
vy>se«<c/s*v>i^i'j« 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 






Sb.elf3-£- 



UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA. 



BACHELOR BLUFF 



HIS OPINIONS, SENTIMENTS, 
AND DISPUTATIONS. 



BY 



OLIVER BELL BUNCE. 



lUU.^ (} 



NEW YORK : 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

I, 3, AND 5 BOND STREET. 

1881. 



3^ 



COPYRIGHT BY 

OLIVER B. BUNCE, 



Habitual readers of " Appletons' Journal," who 
may chance upon this volume, will find in it many 
things with which they are already familiar ; but 
they will also discover that many changes have 
been made — that with a few exceptions the ma- 
terial has been rearranged, extended, newly com- 
bined, and otherwise considerably altered. There 
are indisputably numerous old pieces in the patch- 
work, but the fresh combinations make the patterns 
almost new. 



''Remember;" said Bachelor Bluff, ''that Truth com- 
monly goes 171 russet a7tcl E7'ror Z7i purple. The sober 
judg77ie7it which ca7i 7iot be seduced by the glitter of 
false ideas hides itself i7i by-ways a77io7ig slow, hu77idrum 
people, while Error e7ivelops itself i7i alluri7ig sophistries 
that captivate b7'illia7it 77te7i a7id W077ie7t. Do 7tot de7iy 
this U7itil you have well thought of it, a7td the7t you will 
7iot de7iy it." 

" Ha ve I borrowed I " exclaimed the Bachelor. "Fro7yi 
everything a7id everywhere, to the best of 77iy ability; 
froTft life in its varied for77is, and fro77i those ope7t res- 
ervoirs of stole7i learning called books. He is richest i7i 
this world who borrows i7tost. Let all 77ie7i be i7itel- 
lectual highwaymen, waylaying ideas everywhere, appro- 
priati7ig facts i7i all directio7ts, a7id plu7ideri7tg every 
circu77ista7ice of its sig7iifica7it 77iea7ti7tg;' 

" Wha t is to be learned ! Whether a man learns 
or not, sir, depe7ids up07i the se7isitive7iess of the che7nical 
plate called his brai7i. There are brai7i-plates upo7i which 
everything i77ipr esses a per77ia7te7it i77iage ; others, that 
catch 07ily faint a7id feeble i77ipressio7is ; a7id still others, 



that distort every object cast upon them. There are peo- 
ple, sir, who learn readily, people who learn little, and 
people who begin by htowing nothing, and go on accu- 
mulating ignorance to the e7id of their days." 

" What ARE opinions, after all" muttered Mr. 
Bluff, "but imperfect knowledge? We do not have opin- 
ions about the mtdtiplication-table or the equinoxes. An 
opinion is simply an angle of reflectio7i, or the facet which 
one's individuality presents to a subject, measuring not 
the whole nor majty parts of it, but the dimensions of 
the refecting surface. It is something, perhaps, if the 
reflection within its limits is a true one." 



C O NTENTS. 



I. — Introducing Mr. Bluff . . . .9 

II. — Mr. Bluff on Domestic Bliss ... 13 

III. — Mr. Bluff's Theory of Poetry . . .31 

IV. — Mr. Bluff's Ideal of a House . . 52 

V. — Mr. Bluff on Feminine Tact and Intuitions . 68 
VI. — Mr. Bluff on Realism in Art . . 84 

vii. — Mr. Bluff discourses of the Country and 

Kindred Themes . . . . .99 

VIII. — Mr. Bluff on the Privileges of Women . 120 
IX. — Mr. Bluff on Modern Fiction . . . 139 

X. — Some of Mr. Bluff's Political Notions . 158 
XI. — Mr. Bluff as an Arithmetician . . .178 

xii. — Mr. Bluff's Meditations in an Art-Gallery 1S5 
xiii. — Mr. Bluff on Melancholy . . . 205 

XIV. — Mr. Bluff on Morals in Literature and Nu- 
dity IN Art. ..... 219 

XV. — Mr. Bluff as a Critic on Dress . . 237 

XVI. — Mr. Bluff on Sundry Topics . . . 249 

XVII.— Mr. Bluff's Experiences of Holidays . 277 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



INTRODUCING MR. BLUFF. 

Mr. Oracle Bluff, who is commonly known 
among his friends and acquaintances as Bachelor 
Bluff, because of a disposition on his part to dwell 
upon his experiences as a bachelor, and among scof- 
fers as Old Chatter Bluff, is a gentleman indisputably- 
fond of talking, and very much inclined to believe 
that his opinions cover all the law and the facts. He 
is a gentleman whose years have reached sixty, whose 
figure is somev/hat portly, who carries upon his shoul- 
ders a handsome, well-poised head, covered with scant 
silver locks. He has a broad brow, an ample, close- 
shaved chin, and a mouth which, though flexible, has 
as its general expression set lines indicative of a posi- 
tive and downright character. His eyes are bright 
and restless, full of varying expression, sometimes 
flashing fire, and capable of sending furious glances 



lO BACHELOR BLUFF. 

at opponents, or of bending upon presumptuous dis- 
putants a look of overwhelming severity, and yet they 
have been known upon occasions to melt into tender- 
ness at some pathetic story. 

Mr. Bluff has read a few books, glanced at a few 
pictures, traveled a little, and seen something of 
life; and, believing himself to have accumulated a 
store of observation, is disposed to utter an opin- 
ion upon almost any subject that may be broached. 
It must be conceded that these opinions are not 
commonly borrowed, nor yet do they affect origi- 
nality. They are usually the product of at least a 
half-hour's meditation, it being Mr. Bluff's habit to 
look penetratingly into any theme that comes be- 
fore him, with the purpose of discovering its true 
significance. 

Mr. Bluff thinks himself wholly logical in all that 
he says. He exhibits great confidence in his own 
powers of penetration. He seems, indeed, to think 
that it is his special mission to expose sophistries, put 
shames to rout, and establish everything on a level 
basis of sane reason. He is disposed to believe that 
he possesses wide intellectual sympathies, and no 
doubt indulgent listeners acknowledge the range of 
his topics even if they sometimes question the fullness 
of his intellectual comprehension. He prides himself 
on his discernment and common-sense, but his com- 



INTRODUCING MR. BLUFF. u 

mon-sense is sometimes colored with a few tints of 
imagination. He is doubtless a little prone to Phi- 
listinism, the defect of nearly all robust thinkers, but 
he is not without sympathy for poetical and imagina- 
tive things. He is unfortunately a little deficient in 
humor — not that he can not enjoy a good joke, but 
he rarely ventures to perpetrate one. He does not 
usually see things on their comic side, and would 
be very likely to argue that the comic side of things 
is a distorted and falsified side, but he can distin- 
guish the comic from the joyous and cheerful, and 
he often exhibits impatience at lachrymose views of 
life. Whatever else he may be he is at least honest, 
and frankly expresses just what he thinks, so that, 
whatever crotchets he may utter, they are heartily 
believed in by himself if by no one else. 

Mr. Bluff's great fault is a determination always to 
do the greater part of the talking. He is the worst 
listener at his club, or in any circle where he chances 
to be ; but fortunately his listeners are generally good- 
natured, and gracefully permit him to ramble on, con- 
tenting themselves with stimulating his utterances by 
throwing in remarks whenever there is indication that 
the conversation will flag. A very little mild contra- 
diction, or an adroit suggestion, is all that is necessary 
to set the old gentleman off afresh on a new vein of 
argument and illustration ; and when his listeners are 



12 BACHELOR BLUFF, 

tired of his discourse they quietly slip away, leaving 
him in possession of the field, even if not wholly vic- 
torious in the argument. 

This is Bachelor Bluff. Talkative as he is, he is 
rather liked at his club ; and it is to be hoped that 
his reputation will not suffer by an enlargement of 
his circle of listeners. 



11. 
MR. BLUFF ON DOMESTIC BLISS. 

(^/ Mr. Bluff's Bachelor Apartments) 

Bachelor Bluff, 
Mr. Carriway, 
Mr. Auger. 

" As I am an old bachelor," exclaimed Bach- 
elor Bluff, with an air as if he rather liked 
the imputation, " and generally esteemed a very 
crusty one, my ideas about domestic bliss are pos- 
sibly considered of no moment. Not that I think 
so for my own part; indeed, I am convinced that 
the opinions I entertain on this subject are sound, 
dispassionate, and such as to commend them to all 
unprejudiced judges. I am aware, of course, that all 
old bachelors are supposed to see things with jaun- 
diced eyes only; but the real truth is, they are un- 
biased * lookers-on in Vienna,' see what others can 
not see, and penetrate through disguises by which 
others are deceived. And it has been so long the 
fashion to suppose that domestic bliss is something 
which bachelors neither understand nor appreciate — 



14 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

a sort of sacred felicity that their obdurate hearts 
have not the virtue to embrace — that I am the more 
ready to utter my notions on the subject, just to show- 
that, after all, the entrance into this charmed circle 
is not necessarily through the marriage-ring." 

Bachelor Bluff paused, drummed for a few mo- 
ments on his chair-arm, and then, finding that, 
while no one contradicted him, every one looked 
as if he were expected to go on, resumed: 

" Now, a captious and unhandsome fellow might 
ask if there really is such a thing as domestic bliss, 
except in dreams. Are not the usual attempts to 
secure this social ignis fattms^ he would ask, marred 
by perversity of temper, opposition of ideas, and 
that general selfishness which the seclusion and 
abandon of home bring often so conspicuously to the 
surface? No doubt these questions would be perti- 
nent in view of the kind of domestic bliss that 
commonly survives the arrangement known as mat- 
rimony; but the questioner would be inspired with 
another feeling were he to turn his regards upon 
that depreciated class known as old bachelors. As 
an illustration of the comparative felicities, in a 
domestic way, between the two conditions, let me 
draw a parallel, suggested by recent experience of 
my own — that is, if I shall not bore you." 

" Go on ! go on ! " exclaimed all his listeners. 



MR. BLUFF ON DOMESTIC BLISS. 15 

" It was only three weeks ago that I accepted an 
invitation to spend two days with my friend Appleby. 
Appleby is married. He has a wife — most married 
men have, you will say ; but Appleby's wife makes 
him, as it were, many times married. Her presence, 
her individuality, her temper, her ideas, her wishes, 
her inches, surround and multiply upon him on all 
sides. Appleby has no room in his own house, and 
a very small corner in the outside world, so com- 
pletely does Mrs. Appleby fill the boundaries of Mr. 
Appleby's sphere, and crush him into diminutiveness. 

" I shall not soon forget the scene I beheld the 
first morning that I entered Appleby's breakfast- 
room. In the first place, it faced the north. This 
in itself is an evil. Then it was warmed economi- 
cally by stray heat coaxed away from the kitchen- 
range below, and persuaded to diffuse itself within 
this circle of domestic bliss — which it ordinarily failed 
to do. This was simply an abomination. A break- 
fast-room not cheered in winter by a bright blaze is 
unworthy a place amid the domestic virtues. What 
more enlivening experience is there than that of com- 
ing dov/n in the morning to a bright, cheery break- 
fast-room, in summer glad with the morning sun, in 
winter flushing and sparkling in the light of an open 
fire "^ But this deficiency was not all. Appleby's 
breakfast-room — it is a representative breakfast-room, 



l6 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

and for this reason I select it — was hung with var- 
nished paper, and furnished with oak chairs and an 
oaken buffet. Upon the walls were a few black, old- 
fashioned prints, gloomy in wooden frames. The 
floor was covered with an oak - colored carpet, be- 
cause that cheerless color will not show crumbs. 
The window-curtains were — ^but there were no win- 
dow - curtains. The room was adorned in this par- 
ticular with buff-tinted shades only. This was Apple- 
by's breakfast-room, all garnished and beautified in 
the fine spirit and under the perfect domination of 
' domestic bliss.' And to this breakfast-room came 
Mr. Appleby in slovenly dressing-gown and slovenly 
slippers, Mrs. Appleby in an old shawl and curl-pa- 
pers, and several young Applebys all in tumult and 
snarling disorder. In this cheerless room, half-light- 
ed, dull for want of cheerful tints in the furniture, 
and for lack of a blaze on the hearth, arranged pur- 
posely for a hurried and comfortless matutinal meal, 
the ' domestic bliss ' of the Applebys showed itself in 
a hundred irritabilities. And yet Appleby is always 
boasting about his matrimonial felicities. He never 
fails to introduce in our intercourse the subject of my 
bachelor loneliness and discomfort, and honestly won- 
ders Vv^hy I do not set up in my bachelor quarters a 
Mrs. Bluff (in curl-papers and faded silk, I suppose), 
for the sake of companionship, and domestic comfort, 



MR. BLUFF ON DOMESTIC BLISS. 



17 



and all that. So much for a breakfast under the 
special dominion of feminine government. 

Now, it was only three days after my break- 
fast with the Applebys, that I went to breakfast 
with genial John Bunker. Jack Bunker is a whole- 
souled fellow, who knows when a thing is recherche\ 
and who has the wit to appreciate a bit of bachelor 
felicity. He always breakfasts in his library — this be- 
ing the name his man James gives to his book-room — 
where he has a few books, a few pictures, and gathers 
all the little tasteful articles that he owns — a vase or 
two, a statuette, a rare print, a bit of china, all of which 
he tones up with warm upholstery. I, for my own 
part, like to eat in my best apartment ; to partake of 
my meals under the pleasantest and most enlivening 
conditions. Eating and drinking is with me a fine 
art. That * good digestion may wait on appetite and 
health on both,' I put my mind in its sweetest, its 
calmest, its most contented mood, by means of all 
the agreeable surroundings I can command. Hence I 
looked around Jack Bunker's cozy apartment, tasting 
all the points. There was a glowing blaze from bitu- 
minous coal in the low, polished grate. On a brass 
pendant stood the shining coffee-pot, from which is- 
sued low, murmuring music and delicious odors. The 
firelight was glancing up on the picture-frames, and 
the gilt backs of the books, on the warm-tinted walls 



l8 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

and the ceiling, and on drapery that fell over the 
doorway, and partly shut out partly let in at the 
windows the bright glances of light from the morning 
sun. Then the brilliant white cloth on the table, and 
the easy-chairs for host and guest, and a new picture 
only sent home the day before standing on an easel 
near, and the morning paper warming by the fire — 
well, it was a pleasant picture. Jack rubbed his hands, 
evidently enjoying the air of comfort, brightness, and 
warmth, that filled the whole space, and delighted with 
my appreciation of it all ; and sat himself down in his 
cozy chair, and invited me to mine, and looked around 
at the books and the pictures, and hoped I was 
pleased, 

" I am not going to describe the breakfast further. 
My sole purpose has been to draw two pictures, in 
order to show that domestic bliss is not better under- 
stood or oftener realized by Benedicks than bachelors. 
But no doubt some one will ask why all these condi- 
tions of domestic happiness are not possible with 
* lovely women ' to enhance the bliss of the scene." 

"But think," said young Carriway, who had a 
weakness for sentiment — " think of some beautiful 
creature sitting by the side of the urn, serving your 
coffee, applauding your pictures, listening to you as 
you read a bit of news from the morning journal ; per- 
haps, with her hands in yours, or with her dainty foot 



MR. BLUFF ON DOMESTIC BLISS. ig 

on the fender, chatting with you softly but joyously 
over many pleasant themes." 

" Humph ! " replied Bluff, '' it must be admitted that 
this is a pretty picture. But what if the ' lovely wom- 
an ' comes down to the breakfast-room frouzy and 
fierce ? What if she appears in a dressing-gown and 
curl-papers ? What if she has a chronic fondness for 
deshabille? What if she prove one of those whose 
nerves never get calm or in accord until after the 
morning is well passed ? In my bachelor-home, do- 
mestic bliss is mine, beyond doubt ; if I open the door 
to a 'lovely woman,' there is no telling what Pandora's 
box I shall uncover. Besides, it is a conviction of 
mine that refined and perfect domestic comfort is un- 
derstood by men only." 

" Heresy ! heresy ! " exclaimed half a dozen voices 
at once. 

" Heresy it may be, but my opinion is well-grounded 
for all that. Women are not personally selfish enough 
to be fastidious in these things. They are usually neat 
to circumspection ; but it is a cheerless and aggressive 
neatness — moral and inflammatory rather than luxuri- 
ous and artistic. They are neat because they consti- 
tutionally hate dust, not because neatness is important 
to their own selfish comfort. Women are rarely epi- 
cureans. They have no keen enjoyment of eating and 
drinking, in dreams and laziness ; they do not under- 



20 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

stand intellectual repose. It is not the quiet, the 
serenity, the atmosphere of home, that they at heart 
care about. Give a woman a new ribbon, and she will 
go without her dinner. Promise her a ball, and she 
will sit nightly for a month in a fireless room, muffled 
up in a shawl, and never murmur. She is fond of 
dress, not of comfort ; of decoration, not of peace ; of 
excitement, not felicity. And then, moreover, she is 
too willing to be ill-at-ease ; too easily satisfied in all 
those things that pertain to personal comfort, and is 
far too much disposed to make the best of every thing, 
to enter fully into the necessity of creating domestic 
comfort. She likes home because there she has au- 
thority, there she receives her friends and shows her 
furniture, there she can give parties, and thereby get 
invitations to other parties. When matrimony intro- 
duces a man to recherche breakfasts, to perfect little 
dinners, to delightful social evenings, to perfectly- 
appointed parlors, then I shall believe that true do- 
mestic bliss is feminine in conception." 

" To my mind," remarked Auger, a grave doctor of 
laws, " your notions about domestic bliss are dangerous 
and revolutionary. They will be construed into argu- 
ments against marriage; and marriage, you know, is 
the great conserver of public morality, and the great 
promoter of public welfare." 

" But if I once succeed," retorted Bluff, " in 



MR. BLUFF ON DOMESTIC BLISS. 21 

showing womankind that our domestic comfort is 
not, as society goes, a necessary consequence of 
marriage, the whole sex will set at work to make it 
so." 

" No doubt," Auger replied, " if woman had 
reason to believe that she did not bestow this 
boon upon man, she would be sure to seek out the 
way to secure for him the felicity she knows so well 
how to appreciate for herself." 

" Now, there you are wrong," exclaimed Bluff. 
" Women have no true appreciation of this domestic 
felicity, even while they have remained calm in the 
assurance that men, hungering for the peace of 
home, must come to them for it. They have, with 
very great egotism, scorned with a supreme scorn 
the idea of men being able to have anything or- 
derly, neat, or tasteful, around them without women 
to supply the conditions. They have carried this 
idea so far as to look upon celibacy as not only a 
cheerless thing, but as by necessary implication a 
wicked thing ; and yet instead of women being, as 
they suppose, the source of domestic bliss, they are 
radically and constitutionally its obstacles and ene- 
mies." 

" There could be no home v/ithout women," ex- 
claimed Carriway, with great warmth. 

" I shall not quote history," replied the Bach- 



22 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

elor, coolly, " to show that domesticity in women 
has always been enforced ; that in Eastern coun- 
tries it is secured by compelled seclusion ; that in 
all times it has been the tyranny of man which has 
subjected her to the boundary of home : but I will 
simply give you a reason or two why in the nature 
of things women have not the keen sympathy with 
domestic felicity that men have — that is, if you care 
to hear them." 

"Go on." 

" Men and women, as a consequence of their 
distinct daily occupations, have very different aspi- 
rations and expectations in regard to matrimony. 
How many of our young women, for instance, think 
of domestic well-being as the desired end of mar- 
riage } Do they not -contemplate the gayeties rather 
than the serenities which marriage is to assure 
them t Are not their marriage-dreams of balls, of 
parties, of the opera, of visiting, of traveling } of 
carriages, dresses, jewels, household splendor } of 
social success, and the triumph of position at- 
tained } Instead of Lares and Penates, do they 
not dream of the dazzle and the dash of life } 
And this is a natural consequence of their peculiar 
position. Marriage is to give them their career, 
and hence within it center all their ambitions, all 
their hopes, all the largeness of their future. But, 



MR. BLUFF ON DOMESTIC BLISS. 23 

with man, marriage is something very different. 
Men are out in the world, busy in the great battle 
of life — absorbed in its contests, filled sometimes 
with the triumph of success, and sometimes with 
the chagrin of defeat. Spurred by the stern neces- 
sity of achieving, they have surrendered all their 
energies to the struggle; they are busy with strata- 
gems and manoeuvres, keenly occupied with hopes 
and anxieties, and sometimes even struggling des- 
perately against ruin. This is the life of the man ; 
and this stirring career away from home renders 
home to him necessary as a place of repose, where 
he may take off his armor, relax his strained atten- 
tion, and surrender himself to perfect rest. 

" But home is not this to a v/oman. It is not 
her retreat, but her battle-ground. She does not 
fly to its shelter as an escape from defeat or for a 
temporary lull ; it is her arena, her boundary, her 
sphere. To a woman the house is life militant ; to 
a man it is life in repose. She at home is armed 
with all her energies ; he at home has thrown down 
his arms. She has no other sphere for her activi- 
ties: ordering her household, subduing its rebellions, 
directing its affairs, make up her existence. She 
bustles, she stirs, she controls, she directs, she ex- 
hausts herself in its demands, and then seeks for 
recreation and rest elsewhere. ' I am wearied,' 



24 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



says the husband ; ' let me sit by the fire and 
smoke, and dream, and rest.' 'I am wearied,' says 
the wife ; ' let me be refreshed by a visit to my 
friends, by an evening at the opera, at the theatre, 
at the concert.' 

" And so we see how a natural and radical an- 
tagonism may exist between man and wife as to 
the pleasures and the needs of home. Of course, 
in a vast majority of cases, these antagonisms are 
compromised. Between affectionate couples they 
never break out into warfare ; but they assuredly 
exist, and two such distinct sets of ideas must be 
watched by both husband and wife if they would 
not have them the father of many discontents and 
much infelicity. Do you not see how woman, by 
the very necessities of her existence, must have a 
different idea of home than what man has } " 

" This," said Carriway, " is very like arguing 
that the play of ' Hamlet ' is better with the part 
of Hamlet omitted. We all know the grace and 
charm women give to life ; we all think with pleas- 
ure of that spot which woman renders an oasis in 
the desert of life." 

" Yes, my dear sir, we all think of that oasis 
because we love to contemplate it, because it is so 
essential to our happiness. We make an ideal 
home, and place an ideal woman in it ; but, when 



MR, BLUFF ON DOMESTIC BLISS. 25 

the reality comes, how confoundedly often we are 
disappointed ! " 

" Do you then mean to say, flatly, that celibacy 
is better than marriage ? " asked Auger. 

" By no means. What I hope to do is to con- 
vince ' lovely woman ' that, if we are to continue 
to marry her, she must endeavor to work up to our 
ideals of domestic felicity. She must try and find 
an outlet for her energies, so that at home she can 
fall into our luxuriousness, our love of repose, our 
enjoyment of supreme ease. You see women — I 
purposely do not use the word ladies — are very 
busy endeavoring to make a world of their * pent-up 
Utica.' They sometimes are disposed to have it 
brilliant and animated ; but too often, in blind ser- 
vility to one of their gods, Propriety, make it very 
cold and orderly. The amount of absolute cheer- 
lessness a woman can stand is my amazement." 

" Cheerlessness ! " 

" Yes, cheerlessness," replied the Bachelor, em- 
phatically. " Our women have an affection for 
flowers, ribbons, laces, silks, music, pets ; but are 
singularly insensible to cheerlessness. They like 
dark rooms. They prefer heat from a hole in the 
wall rather than from a bright blaze. They ask 
you to dine under a dim jet of gas. They will 
shiver through a cold storm in autumn, rather than 



26 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

light a fire a day earlier than the almanac permits. 
A woman may have all the known virtues of her 
class ; all the gentleness, humility, grace, domestic 
virtue, poets have sung about — and yet, if you 
should ask for a blaze on the hearth on a dark, 
wet, chilly day in September, ten chances to one 
the request would be too much for her patience. 

" Some women," continued the Bachelor, finding 
that no one interrupted him, " are slovenly — let us 
hope not many — I have seen untidy toilets, though ; 
but, when a woman is not slovenly, she is often so 
neat, trim, precise, methodical, and circumspect, that 
she excludes all color, all freedom, all tone from her 
house. Upon all forms of untidiness such a woman 
makes tempestuous warfare. Now, this is utterly 
destructive to domestic bliss — an essential element 
of which is ease and a sense of completeness. One 
can not be content if always under the smell of 
soapsuds, or if ceaselessly disturbed by the bustle 
of administration. The ultimatum of a woman's 
household luxury is apt to be the satisfaction of 
saying, * There is not a speck of dust to be seen.' 
But this negative idea of home will not do. It is 
not sufficient to say there is no dust, no disorder, 
no untidiness, no confusion. We must have active 
ideas at work. We must have colors and sounds 
and sights to cheer, to refine, to delight us. But, 



MR. BLUFF ON DOMESTIC BLISS. 27 

you see, to create a paradise of indolence, to fill 
the mind with an ecstasy of repose, to render home 
a heaven of the senses — women are usually too vir- 
tuous to do this. Daintiness in man takes an ar- 
tistic form ; in woman it assumes a formidable or- 
der, a fearful cleanliness, a precision of arrangement 
that freeze us." 

"But all this," broke in Carriway, "is no longer 
the case. There was a time, no doubt, when your 
picture would have been strictly true. But now 
art has entered the house ; color, banished by Pu- 
ritan asceticism, has reasserted itself. Do we not 
see on every hand the new arts and the new de- 
vices for making home beautiful } " 

" For making home a museum ! " growled the 
Bachelor. " Yes, there is now a craze for what is 
called household art, but it is for the most part 
only a new form of cheerlessness, a passion for mak- 
ing the parlor a show-room, the splendor of which 
must not be touched and scarcely looked upon save 
by the outside world. It is art for Mrs. Grundy, 
and not for the inmates of the house. Mrs. Grundy 
is the power of powers. If a woman has only two 
rooms in the world, one of these is furnished, gar- 
nished, set in order, and kept for the approbation 
of that venerable lady. Domestic comfort must live 
elsewhere than in the apartments devoted tO' this 



28 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

lady — who exacts of all her devotees velvet carpet 
that must not be trod on, damask furniture that 
must not be sat on, and all forms of finery that 
must not be warmed by good, honest fires, lest the 
dust alight on them, or opened to the pleasant rays 
of the sun, lest his beams fade them. The disorder 
that sometimes is held up as dom^estic comfort I 
feel no sympathy with ; domestic bliss is to my taste 
first-cousin to elegance, and an elegance that enters 
into one's daily being. Unless one is a man of 
wealth it is better to banish set-up conventional par- 
lors altogether, and live and dine in the best apart- 
ment, seated among books, pictures, and the best 
furniture, invoke peace and comfort. Give us, I 
emphatically say, in our households color and cheeri- 
ness — not cold art nor cold pretensions of any kind, 
but warmth, brightness, animation. Bring in pleas- 
ing colors, choice pictures, bi-ic-a-brac^ and what-not ; 
but let in also the sun ; light the fires ; and have 
everything for daily use." 

" You have omitted one important thing," re- 
marked Carriway. 

" What is that } " 

" Love ! " 

" Ah ! that is something which bachelors, how- 
ever agreeable they may make their apartments, must 
often sigh for. But love flourishes well when such 



MR. BLUFF ON DOMESTIC BLISS. 29 

notions as I have advanced are heeded ; and then, 
men are such devotees of the senses, that so fair 
and delicate a thing as love will perish if women do 
not look well to make it a companion of domestic 
felicity." 

*' To my mind," said Auger, who had evidently 
been brooding intently over something, " we have 
driven out all the pleasure and sweetness of home 
in order to make room for a set of regulation com- 
forts. We heat our houses by elaborate labor-saving 
furnaces; we light them with gas that flows into our 
rooms from far-off retorts ; we have water, hot or 
cold, in our bedrooms at a touch ; we surround 
ourselves with these numerous, well-ordered conven- 
iences, and yet for every comfort we thus purchase 
we shut the door upon some felicity. The essential 
enjoyment of a pleasure, we must remember, is by 
contrast. We know what sunlight is by storm ; what 
day is by night; what warmth is by cold; what the 
pleasures of the appetite are by hunger. The sweet- 
ness of labor past is often confessed ; but we forget 
the sweetness of a comfort won. How can a family 
be cozy, confiding, cheerful, and united, around a 
blazing fire in the sitting-room, if every other apart- 
ment in the house is equally agreeable } When the 
temperature of a home in winter-time is the same 
throughout, the household hearth, so full of delight- 



30 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



ful associations, so honored in song and story, dis- 
appears. And, then, there is always a sacrifice of 
health in these uniformly-heated houses, especially 
with home-kept women. Used day after day to a 
uniform temperature, the moment they venture into 
the street the sharp change tells upon their sensitive 
flesh severely, and usually fastens a cold upon them. 
A pleasure is only enjoyed with thorough raciness 
and heartiness when it comes infrequently, or as a 
contrast: if we build ourselves up in organized ease, 
if we surround ourselves with methodized comforts, 
our * primrose path of dalliance ' may be easy to 
tread, but life will lose its keen relish, and satiety 
sooner or later extinguish our capacity for enjoy- 
ment." 

There was a general murmur of assent to this, 
and then the conversation drifted to other themes. 



III. 
MR. BLUFF'S THEORY OF POETRY. 

(/« the Library.^ 

A Poet, 
Bachelor Bluff. 

Poet^ How is it that so many sensible people as- 
sume toward poetry an attitude of intellectual dis- 
dain } 

Bachelor Bluff. Perhaps because they are sensible 
people. The pretensions, the arrogance, the assump- 
tion of the poets, and the would-be poets, may well 
induce wise people to inquire what there is in this 
poetry which is so clamorously exalted. 

Poet. I do not refer to people who find all poe- 
try wholly without charm; these, unfortunately, are 
but too large in number. There are many persons 
who possess what usually passes for a decided poetic 
taste, who yet demand from the verses which they 
read little else besides a gratification of their rhyth- 

* Much of what the Poet utters in this colloquy was contrib- 
uted by Mr. Edgar Fawcett, but it appears here unedited by him. 



32 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

mic sense on the one hand, and a general mipres- 
sion on the other that they are having things very 
pleasantly put. In not a few cases it would seem 
as if they looked upon poetry as a kind of mental 
retiring-room, where yawning, and stretching, and 
lolling upon cushions, must of necessity be admis- 
sible — as a place where one need no longer concern 
himself with the stricter exactitudes; v/here misrep- 
resentation has an agreeable right to work its law- 
less will ; where beauty is not solely its own ex- 
cuse for being, but for being often rather scornful, 
as well, of how far reason restrains; and where 
grace, melody, and color, can form substitutes for 
solid thought no less efficient than attractive. I 
have frequently been struck with the way in which 
persons have welcomed certain ideas, when clothed 
poetically, which might have easily roused their 
worst polemic instincts if presented in a prosaic 
form. It is probable that this sudden toleration is 
less owing to the luxurious fascination of meter and 
rhythm than to a general understanding that matter 
has now become of slight importance, and manner 
delightfully the reverse. I confess that it amazes 
me to see a man of intellect holding passages of 
poetry in fond remembrance, which if written in 
prose he would never think of quoting; and I am 
now secretly of the belief that it is, after all, only 



MR. BLUFF'S THEORY OF POETRY. 33 

" the mellow oes and aes " that he cares about, and 
that in his consideration the thought occupies some- 
thing decidedly lower than a secondary place. The 
chief aim of all poetry is, no doubt, to be beautiful, 
but it is most loftily and enduringly beautiful when 
its thought is massive, profound, and original. 
Merely to expect from it soothative, agreeable, or 
sensuous effects, is to underrate its finest capabili- 
ties. Merely to seek emotional pleasure from it is 
to leave unemployed half its powers for giving 
pleasure at all. 

Bluff. I do not agree with you; in fact, I affirm 
that the function of poetry is not thought, but e77to- 
tion. The sole thing which distinguishes it from 
other forms of literary art is its metrical construc- 
tion, in which lies the only power it possesses for 
giving pleasure which it does not share with all 
literature and the arts. It is really irritating to 
hear the claims put forth so continuously of the 
purposes, the functions, the attributes, the results, 
the what-not, of poetry, the majority of persons 
seeming to think that ideas, when expressed in ac- 
cordance with certain metrical rules, attain an occult 
power which they could not possess in so-called 
plain prose. Now, these ideas do gain by the aid 
of rhythm a measurable force or power, but this is 
nothing more than the charm of melody — which 



34 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

alone separates poetry from prose. The confusion 
on this subject, however, is as extensive as human 
nature. I doubt if accurate thinking or accurate 
definition is possible. I am not thinking of the 
dictionaries, but of efforts made by people generally 
to indicate the essential quality or separate function 
which anything possesses. I find, for instance, one 
of our essayists affirming that the purpose and end 
of poetry were never more accurately stated than in 
the lines by Keats : 

"... It should be a friend 
To soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of man." 

I advise you to quote those lines to any person not 
acquainted with them, and ask him to guess what 
it is that is to act as this " friend." Can that be 
called a definition or description of anything which 
applies with equal pertinency and force to a hun- 
dred other things.? The lines by Keats are just as 
true of music, of painting, of eloquence, of imagina- 
tive prose, as they are of poetry, and they really 
apply with greater truth to religion than to anything 
else. If we want to know the true value, the real 
purpose, the exact quality of anything, we must dis- 
cover what it possesses that separates it from other 
things — what faculty, or function, or principle, or 
law, pertains to it alone, and by which it may be 



MR. BLUFF'S THFORY OF POETRY. 35 

distinguished. Now, why is there poetry? What is 
its excuse for being ? What distinctive quality does 
it possess ? What special end has it in view ? 
What are the features or signs by which it may be 
known ? 

Poet. Poetry, like wit, humor, and even art, can 
not be accurately defined. Its essence is subtile, its 
qualities illusive, and, although there are poets who 
divine its secret, no one has been able to put his 
divination into the form of a definition. 

Bluff. No one, I grant, has been able to define 
or explain the secret of the charm which melody 
exerts upon us; and neither can the charm of color 
or form be explained ; but the definition of poetry 
is simply that it is a form of literary expression 
which employs meter — a metrical arrangement of 
syllables with the purpose of delighting the ear by 
rhythmic beat and recurrence of sound. It is the 
stem from which music has separated into a special 
development. 

Poet. This is nothing more than a definition of 
verse. You limit your terms wholly to the mechan- 
ical execution of lines — to that feature which ad- 
dresses the ear, ignoring altogether the essence and 
true spirit of poetry — its embodiment of the beau- 
tiful, its exaltation, its inspiration and insight, its 
crystallization of thought, its power of picture-mak- 



36 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

ing, its profound moods and divinations. It is mon- 
strous to assume that poetry is merely a succession 
of words in a smooth and sensuous order. So far 
from this being true, I affirm that it primarily in- 
carnates the beautiful, but achieves its highest func- 
tion only when it is philosophical and profound. 
Buckle goes so far as to say that the abstract meth- 
ods of poetry act as stimuli to precise scientific 
investigation, that it is often the avant-courrier of 
detailed and formulated knowledge, throwing its 
light over lands into which science has not yet 
ventured. "There is in poetry," he says, "a divine 
and prophetic power which, if properly used, would 
make it the ally of science instead of the enemy. 
By the poet, Nature is contemplated on the side of 
the emotions ; by the man of science, on the side 
of the understanding. But the emotions are as 
much a part of us as the understanding. They 
are as truthful ; they are as likely to be right. 
Though their view is different, it is not capricious. 
They obey fixed laws; they follow an orderly and 
uniform course ; they run in sequences ; they have 
their logic and method of inference. Poetry, there- 
fore, is a part of philosophy, simply because the 
emotions are a part of the mind. If the man of 
science despises their teaching, so much the worse 
for him. He has only half his weapons; his arsenal 



MR. BLUFF'S THEORY OF POETRY. 37 

is unfilled." This places poetry, you see, side by 
side with the highest intellectual efforts; it estab- 
lishes that its mission is not merely to be musical, 
not solely to be sensuous, not exclusively to be 
beautiful, but to go hand-in-hand with the intellect 
in its profoundest philosophical pursuits and studies. 
Bluff. My good sir, the works of the great poets 
exhibit all the transcendent qualities you have enu- 
merated — beauty, wisdom, inspiration, insight, divina- 
tion, exaltation, philosophy — all are there; but beau- 
ty, wisdom, divination, philosophy, are all found 
just as strikingly in the great prose-writers as in 
the poets. There is not one thing, not one, which 
you have set down as the attribute of poetry that 
exclusively belongs to it. All that Buckle says per- 
tains to imagination and the emotions; he is using 
the word poetry in the popular sense, as if it were 
synonymous with beauty and certain exalted mental 
qualities. He simply affirms the value of the im- 
agination as compared with reason, and exalts the 
emotions as forces even in purely intellectual pur- 
suits ; and surely imagination and emotion are as 
competent to act as handmaids to science and phi- 
losophy in elevated prose as in poetry. Prose is 
capable of expressing the whole range of human 
thought, human aspiration, human feeling; of reach- 
ing the heart, of rousing the imagination, of stirring 



38 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

the emotions, of exciting the fancy ; it possesses 
every weapon and every resource the poet is en- 
dowed with, excepting the single one of melody. 
Come, here is a volume of Tennyson at my hand. 
Let me open it at random, and read the first pas- 
sage that falls under my eye. ... I have hit upon 
" The Princess," and here are a few lines that my 
eye alights upon : 

"... Out we paced, 
" I first, and, following through the porch that sang 
All round with laurel, issued in a court 
Compact of lucid marbles, bossed with lengths 
Of classic frieze, with ample awnings gay 
Betwixt the pillars, and with great urns of flowers. 
The Muses and the Graces, grouped in threes, 
Enringed a billowing fountain in the midst ; 
And here and there on lattice edges lay 
Or book or lute." 

This is a captivating picture; it is a perfect piece 
of word-painting; but how easy to transpose it all 
into prose, losing thereby just the ineffable charm 
of metrical arrangement — just this and no more I 
Study it well, and you will see there is no known 
means by which it can be distinguished from prose 
excepting its meter — and this, consequently, makes 
it poetry. 

Poet. Carry this out, and any piece of doggerel 



MR. BLUFF'S THEORY OF POETRY. 



39 



is poetry, no matter how empty, vacant, worthless, 
it may be. 

Bluff. Just as a poor picture in color must be 
classed, like Titian's " Venus " or Murillo's " As- 
sumption," as painting; just as the naturalist under 
the term mammalia must group the mouse and the 
lion. Classification in these things is not by quality^ 
but by structure ; by the latter we have the kind^ by 
the former the rank. 

Poet. The mere use of rhythm does not of itself 
separate the two forms. If we say, " The moon 
arose," we have measure and rhythm, but assuredly 
not poetry ; if we say, " The moon unveiled her 
peerless light and threw across the scene her silver 
mantle," we have the fact expressed in poetry — and 
it would still be poetry if we reconstructed the sen- 
tence so as to exclude the m.eter. 

Bluff. This is the difference between the simple 
and the ornate^ and not the difference between prose 
and poetry. If it were so, nineteen twentieths of 
our poetry would have to be remanded to prose — 
including nearly all that Wordsworth and his fol- 
lowers have written. Twist the theory as you will, 
you will find that meter is the quality, and the only 
quality, that indicates poetical composition. If there 
is anything else in poetry which prose does not pos- 
sess, point it out. 



.|0 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

Foet. Poetry crystallizes ideas, concentrates a 
world into a phrase, expounds a philosophy in a 
sentence. It is sinewy with thought, it is a succes- 
sion of captivating pictures, it ennobles and trans- 
figures, it glorifies with splendid colors, it reveals 
with searching analysis, it embodies the highest wis- 
dom, gives form to the most glorious dreams, fixes 
and shapes a thousand otherwise illusive beauties. 
Rhythmical utterance is its vehicle only. The quality 
which makes metrical lines poetry is something that 
utterly escapes analysis; and in this discussion it is 
well to keep in mind the original meaning of the 
word — which is, to iuake^ to create. The poet, when 
fulfilling his true office, is a creator, a seer. 

Bluff. It is this original significance of the word 
which has led to all the ecstatic utterances on the 
subject. The poet preceded the prose-writer ; his 
songs and hymns were the sole vehicle for the ex- 
pression of imaginative ideas, for the relation of he- 
roic deeds, for the utterance of emotional thought. 
Poetry was the whole of literature. The poet was 
a maker and seer not because he sung in numbers, 
but because he was the voice of prophecy, the chron- 
icler of history, the teacher of morals, the expositor 
of the passions and the sentiments. To-day litera- 
ture and the arts in their various forms do now for 
mankind what the poet did in the beginning of civ- 



MR. BLUFF'S THEORY OF POETRY. 41 

ilization. In some things prose accomplishes this 
end better than poetry. You say, for instance, that 
poetry crystallizes ideas. Now, the very best crys- 
tallized thought is in our proverbs, which for the 
most part are in prose. It happens sometimes that 
the requirements of rhythm or rhyme lead to great 
compactness, but it also sometimes happens that they 
lead to padding and feeble extension. Neither com- 
pactness nor verbiage is, therefore, an inevitable or 
necessary condition of poetry — the arbitrary long 
and short syllables and terminal rhymes determining 
absolutely which of these two things shall charac- 
terize a line. Crystallization, moreover, implies ac- 
curacy of thought and clearness of thought. In 
neither of these things has poetry any advantage 
over prose. In prose we can choose with utmost 
precision the exact word or phrase we need ; in 
poetry the recurring beat is tyrannical, and is just 
as likely to enforce an obscure as a luminous phrase. 
The rhyme and the meter often lead to awkward 
inversions and forced expressions that are fatal to 
clearness and precision of thought. All that the 
poetical form can do is to help fix an idea in the 
memory by a sonorous ring, or by smooth and flow- 
ing cadence. Coleridge has defined poetry as the 
best word in the best place. This is not a defini- 
tion of poetry, but a definition of style. The poet 



42 BACHELOR BLUFF, 

selects the best word he can, but is often com- 
pelled to surrender the most accurate word for one 
that will better meet the requirements of his versi- 
fication—to which, as Byron tells us, all things must 
yield. 

Poet. This I grant ; but the other high qualities 
that I have named, they assuredly are not so much 
a function of prose as of poetry. 

Bluff. They may not be as commonly found in 
prose as in poetry, but prose can reach any height 
of imagination or expression that poetry can. Wit- 
ness the great orations. Would one of Burke's 
splendid speeches be fuller of strong thought, of 
more brilliant fancies, of more swelling diction, of 
more inspired fervor, of greater imaginative reach, 
had it been thrown into verse — had it supplemented 
these things with the best resources of the poets } 
Cast one of his orations into poetry, and it would 
lose in clearness, directness, and force; but there 
would be passages the beauty of which would be 
greatly enhanced by meter and cadence, and cer- 
tain lines would ring in the ear with a resonance 
never to be forgotten. 

Poet. But there are subtiler melodies in poetry 
than the melody of numbers. In true poetry words 
are wedded by affinities too delicate to be formu- 
lated into rules. Every one knows the laws for 



MJ^. BLUFF'S THEORY OF FOE FRY. 43 

constructing blank verse, but how few can write 
really good lines of this character! 

Bluff. Every one knows the rules of composi- 
tion, but how few can write good prose ! There 
are as many harmonies and subtilties in prose as 
in poetry — the arrangement of words by nice and 
perfect fitness is as possible and almost as difficult 
in one form as in another. 

Poet But poetry is always necessarily identified 
with fancy and imagination; we exact of it those 
conditions, and can think of no excuse for its being 
unless it carries the mind into realms of beauty. 

Bhff. There is no excuse for any art unless it 
does just this thing — unless it stirs the emotions 
and exalts the imagination. This is the special do- 
main of all art. We are charmed with the ideas, 
the pictures, the imagery, the fancies, the conceits, 
the suggestions, the beauty, so generally found in 
poetry, and thus are seduced into the idea that 
these things jnake poetry, forgetting that they exist 
in entire independence of special modes of expres- 
sion. Now, that which constitutes a painting is 
color J it is not the story, the ideas, the hundred 
other things that please us therein : everything else 
but color may be expressed by literature, or sculpt- 
ure, or drawing in black-and-white. A painting /> 
a painting by the employment of pigments, and 



44 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

worthily so by rightly using them. Sculpture sepa- 
rates itself from other forms of art by the fact of 
its being form in relief; whatever other charm or 
quality it possesses does not belong to it because it 
is sculpture. It is barren enough if beauty and 
imagination are not in it, but, while these things 
may determine the rank of a work by the chisel, 
they do not determine its classification. It is there- 
fore a particular method that makes poetry, not the 
ideas that leaven the performance, that elevate it, 
that consecrate it, that make it glorious. These are 
the qualities that make verse great poetry. 

Poet. Every mind is fixed in the idea that poe- 
try means beautiful thought, and not the sing-song 
of the meter. We often hear a beautiful sunset 
described as poetical. A charming fancy is always 
crowned as poetical. 

Bluff. It would be just as logical to characterize 
a beautiful sunset or a fine conceit as sculpturesque ! 
We can not get accurate understanding on this sub- 
ject by calling in popular confusion as a witness. 
We may sweep all the poetical literature in the 
world out of existence, let the art of versification 
perish, and yet we would not abridge in the least 
the dreams, the fancies, the conceits, or any of the 
emotional or imaginative forces of the world. 

Poet. It is not worth while uttering the truism 



MR. BLUFF'S THEORY OF POETRY. 45 

that emotion and imagination exist without poetry. 
No one will deny it. But the poet appropriates 
and exalts them ; he gives them habitation, form, 
and expression ; he unites them with all other at- 
tributes of the mind. The supreme quality of poe- 
try, its exalted service, is not that it charms the 
ear, or pleases the fancy, or interests the intelli- 
gence, but that it simultaneously appeals to the 
several sides of our nature involved in the mind, 
the emotions, and the senses. It is the co?ise?tsus of 
several things that makes poetry. Its dominion is 
over the whole being. It reasons, it thinks, it feels, 
it dreams ; while its cadence charms the ear, and its 
warm pictures lull the senses, its outflying thoughts 
compass the world. 

Bluff. This simultaneous action upon the intel- 
lect and the senses, this consensus of many qualities 
which make poetry v/orthy, is necessary to give any 
human work of the imagination a high place. As 
to thinking, that has little place in poetry or in 
any art. Poets dream and make pictures — this is 
about all. The notion which you seemed to find 
sanctioned in Buckle, that the mere metrical ar- 
rangement of words can aid in thinking, promote 
good thinking, or be anything else than an incum- 
brance to accurate thinking, is absurd. Poetry has 
an abundance of enthusiasm, passion, emotion, ideali- 



46 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

zation, sensuous charm, but little or no real thought. 
Those who are to do genuine thinking must clear 
themselves of every possible obstruction — all rules 
of form, all dictations of method, all devices that 
allure the senses. 

Poet. Enthusiasm and passion are only the gar- 
ment clothing the clear and definite idea within. 
You must recollect that, to have the mirage, we 
must have the actuality. The mountain is still a 
mountain, whether we see it in its rugged lines, or 
when it looms a changing mass of violet vapor. 
John Stuart Mill has written on the woman's-rights 
question, and Tennyson has also written upon it in 
" The Princess." In the prose of one writer there 
is the able discussion of a subtile question, after a 
manner no less powerful than limpid, and marked 
by particularizations, items, specializations. In the 
verse of the other writer there are supreme fervor, a 
splendid picturesqueness, and every possible acces- 
sory of fine rhythm and mellow voweling. One is 
deliberative and practical thought, the other emo- 
tional and desultory. One is a landscape whose 
least grass-blade, bough, or road-line, meets us with 
vivid distinctness ; the other is the same landscape 
flooded with transfiguring moonlight, its most salient 
features alone visible, and these softened or made 
sublime. 



MR. BLUFF'S THEORY OF POETRY. 47 

Bluff. This is the difference between exact logic 
and the suggestiveness, the breadth, the half-touches 
of art. All that poetry does is to heighten these 
art-effects by the mysterious charm of cadence — for 
cadence in its effect upon the human mind may be 
fairly called mysterious. We know that color simply 
as color is a great delight ; while the fine propor- 
tions and graceful lines of form have the capacity 
to thrill and fascinate us. In the same way mere 
mellow syllables have the power to create sweet 
sensations. If these musical syllables are nothing 
but empty sound, why not write in prose } You 
have heard the winds moan and whisper in the 
tree-tops; you have listened to the fall of water 
over rocks, and the splash of fountains ; you know 
the charm of a soft voice in woman : these are evi- 
dence of what a quality in Nature mere sound is. 
Now, I make the bold assertion that poetry exists 
solely because of the delight of the human ear in 
cadence and mellow sound. 

Poet. Why, then one needs only neat blendings 
of vowels and consonants for the making of poetry. 

Bluff. If the cadence were united to purely 
empty and meaningless words, all our other senses 
would revolt against the lines. But the charm of 
cadence is so great that it seems to clothe vague- 
ness and obscurity with meaning, and will seduce a 



48 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

reader into admiring lines that he can not define 
or explain, the meaning of which but faintly glim- 
mers in his mind. I have often been struck, when 
hearing poets read their verses, how completely the 
musical idea predominated. It is said that Tenny- 
son reads his own poems in a monotonous sing- 
song. Within my experience, I have never heard a 
poet recite poetry in a manner to show that he had 
the least idea of its meaning ; he invariably thinks 
of nothing but the cadence. If there were no 
meaning, then the verses, of course, would excite 
disdain. But in many cases any form of half-hinted 
suggestion suffices — and vagueness, let me say, is le- 
gitimately a force and quality in poetry, just as it is 
in all art. It is found in the greatest poets, as in 
the greatest artists, and completely establishes the 
axiom that poetry is not thought, but feeling. It is 
related that in Turner's time a well-known engraver 
called upon the great artist for an explanation as to 
the meaning of a vague shape in one corner of a 
painting which he had undertaken to reproduce on 
steel. " What do you think it is ? " gruffly asked 
the painter. The engraver hesitatingly replied that 
he didn't know, but perhaps it was a wheelbarrow. 
" Well, make it a wheelbarrow," exclaimed the 
painter, and turned on his heel. The painter had 
in his mind a scheme of color, and was wholly in- 



MR. BLUFF'S THEORY OF POETRY. 49 

different to details of form. In the same way a 
poet often makes and masses impression by felici- 
tous sound, in which there is but uncertain and illu- 
sive sense. 

Poet. I must admit that much of our modern 
poetry has the sins of obscurity and wordiness. 
The first, as in the case of Browning, often con- 
ceals much sinewy and laudable thought ; the sec- 
ond but too often conceals a disheartening vacu- 
um. There are songs scattered through Swinburne's 
poem, " The Sailing of the Swallow," which are 
simply a collection of gaudy-colored words, that may 
mean almost anything one pleases to have them 
mean. They are the hollow shell of poetry — rain- 
bow-tinted, it is true, but without any sesthetic right 
to exist. It is in the most perfect blending of the 
sweetest sound with the noblest sense that poetry 
finds her loftiest and best expression. When the 
first preponderates over the second (as it is con- 
stantly doing in Browning's work), the result is 
crude, inharmonious, and often even repulsive. When 
(as we too often find in the case of Swinburne) 
there is a great deal of rhythm and color, and very 
little else besides, the artistic error is still more 
grave. I do not mean that this perfect union is 
always to be sought for, but I maintain that even 
in the simplest ballad a certain dignity of idea is 
3 



50 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

indispensable. Among poems which are passionate 
expressions of sorrow, longing, despair, or religious 
faith, the higher imaginative traits are out of place; 
but here, as always, no amount of rhetorical ele- 
gance may properly hide an underlying platitude. 
Yet, in all the more ambitious conceptions, this 
stately equipoise is to be aimed for. Milton accom- 
plished it in his epic, or at least grandly approxi- 
mated toward its accomplishment. Pollok, in his, 
fell short on the intellectual and not the metrical 
side. In Pope the two elements of the combination 
were excellently suited one to another, though nei- 
ther was of the lordlier ideal sort. Keats erred ex- 
travagantly in the direction of voluptuous phrasing, 
often almost smothering his thoughts in mere mode 
of utterance, or making them pass before the reader 
like shapes that staggered beneath burdens of flow- 
ers. Shelley came very near, in certain instances, 
wedding " perfect music unto noble words " ; and 
perhaps no writer of any time has acquired a more 
superb evenness between the thing said and the 
manner of saying it than Tennyson. We have all 
heard of " the light that never was on sea or land." 
It is precisely this light which, if thrown over cer- 
tain objects, must produce in all cases the exquisite 
and unexplainable effect called '' poetry." But if 
the object does not exist — if the light be thrown 



MR. BLUFF'S THEORY OF POETRY. 



51 



upon vacuity — what wonder if the result has still a 
beauty which in not a few cases annoys us by the 
meaningless charm which it exerts ? 

Bluff, *' The light that never was on sea or 
land," let me tell you, is simply the light bestowed 
by imagination ; it glows in Turner's skies, in the 
eloquence of Burke, in the prose of Ruskin ; it is 
shared by the poets with all others who are touched 
with the fire of inspiration. 



IV. 



MR. BLUFF'S IDEAL OF A HOUSE. 

{A( the Club.) 

Bachelor Bluff, 
A Dreamer. 

" I PICTURED to myself, the other day, in a half- 
dream," said the Dreamer, " a house which em- 
bodied all the latest and best ideas of taste and 
art-culture." 

•' It must have been a dream, indeed ! " ex- 
claimed Bachelor Bluff, turning restlessly in his 
chair. "But, pray, what did your sleeping imagina- 
tion set forth as the ideal of a house "i " 

" It was a house like a symphony — all in har- 
mony, and tone, and perfect keeping. Color was 
the silent music of this house ; form and proportion 
were the foundations of its being. It was a house 
in which there were beauty, repose, peace, and 
sweetness. The eye rested with lasting pleasure 
upon fine adjustments of beautiful objects, and the 



AIR. BLUFF'S IDEAL OF A HOUSE. 53 

mind found intellectual stimulus in treasures of 
painting, marble, and bronze." 

" Yes, I see ! Your dream was of a house toned 
up, so to speak, to a high-art pitch — one of Whis- 
tler's 'symphonies of color.' Well, this is not new 
in the world of dreams. I am not sure but it 
would be as well if houses of the kind existed only 
as a fantastic nothing of the imagination. There 
was a time when the ideal of a perfect house was 
one which bloomed with thriving olive-branches — a 
nest where under protecting wings life came into 
being, expanded, filled all the spaces with love 
and music, and which eventually sent out into the 
world hearty and honest souls fit to cope with 
it and to adorn it. But now the ideal house is a 
bric-a-brac shop. Nevertheless, let me hear fur- 
ther." 

" In the house I imagined," continued the Dream- 
er, " there entered the matured and perfect knowl- 
edge of a trained taste — there were no incongruities, 
no vulgarities, no discords. It exhibited in its plan 
both a severe and a liberal mind; it had harmony 
and unity with abundant variety. Just as we find 
in Nature rich contrasts, manifold details, and broad 
effects and masses, so the appointments and adorn- 
ments of this house were blended into a consistent 
and delightful whole." 



54 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

" This is all very well for generalization," said 
the Bachelor. " But my imagination can not live 
on mere summaries. I wait for some of the de- 
tails in the furnishing of this marvelous mansion." 

" Our dreams are apt, you know, to grasp at a 
detail here and there, but they rest content in the 
main with vague, half-defined pictures ; but I will 
recall all the particulars I can of my Utopian house. 
The first thought, apparently, of the artistic decora- 
tor in regard to each room was to inquire whether 
it was to be beautiful in itself, or a place into which 
beautiful things were to be gathered. If the latter, 
then the walls, ceiling, floors, were considered sim- 
ply as foils for the articles and objects which were 
to be set off against them. Imagine a drawing-room 
the walls of which were covered with a paper of 
warm olive tint, through which intertwine with 
glints of gilt a slightly-defined leaf-pattern — a mere 
suggestion of form, just sufticient to break the mo- 
notony of the tint. The result was walls which, 
while in themselves a charm to the eye, were never- 
theless but little more than a background against 
which form and color had pure and perfect relief. 
In the dado below were definite forms and colors, 
though still subdued, while the frieze beneath the 
cornice was of rich Pompeian device and color. It 
is needless to say that this principle of wall-decora- 



AIR. BLUFF'S IDEAL OF A HOUSE. 



55 



tion now enters many houses, but it is still wholly 
unknown to innumerable people, who seem uncon- 
scious that markings, devices, and figures on the 
wall mix with and confuse the figures and colors 
that adorn the objects placed against it. Color 
against color, paintings against painting, we still see 
in many houses. And yet no flat, whitened surface, 
no raw, cold tint, even if without pattern or de- 
vices, can serve as a suitable background for paint- 
ings or prints. No ingenuity in the multiplication 
of pictures, or in the adjustment of furniture, can 
make a room of this kind anything but raw and 
discordant. In this parlor of my imagination there 
were hung against the satisfying negative of the 
walls a few paintings of captivating beauty, all 
framed in such a way that the frames, instead of 
competing with the pictures, as is so often the case, 
hum.bly served to heighten their effect. These paint- 
ings were not tragedies, nor histories, nor portraits, 
nor narratives. They had no stories to tell but the 
story of beauty. There were no groups of men and 
women busy at nothing, and projecting noisy cos- 
tumes upon the scene. The pictures, for the most 
part, were landscapes full of poetry and tenderness; 
they were delicious moods of Nature, studies munifi- 
cent in color, and rich with mellow depths of mys- 
terious shadows. Who looked upon these paintings 



56 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

slipped away into dreams ; he was transported to 
Elysium ; there stole over him rest, and peace, and 
contentment." 

" I certainly shall not quarrel with your ideas of 
pictures. How about the furniture of this wonder- 
ful room ? " 

" I declare I do not know whether the furniture 
was Gothic or Renaissance, Queen Anne, or buhl. 
I think there was no exactness of style ; I remem- 
ber only that each object seemed in itself beautiful, 
and rightly adjusted to the beauty and character of 
every other object. The divans, sofas, chairs, all 
exhibited repose and simplicity, with great purity of 
form and suitable variety of line, with but little 
carving, and this a part of the wood, instead of an 
adjunct to it. They were covered with stuffs the 
texture and tints of which resembled Eastern rugs ; 
they were soft, so as to suggest ease and repose to 
the body, and of colors whose subdued blendings 
gave ease and repose to the eye. There v/ere no 
doors, the bald and ugly panels of which no art 
can redeem; but instead curtains draped the en- 
trance-ways, hung from ebony poles. There were 
hanging cabinets, also of ebony, but picked out with 
tiles and ornaments, which were filled with speci- 
mens of porcelain that were valuable because rare, 
but more valuable because selected with admirable 



AIR. BLUFF'S IDEAL OF A HOUSE. V7 

perception of harmony of color and elegance of 
form. There were shelves with artistic bronzes, me- 
dallions, and gems ; and an easel which held rare 
etchings. All about, indeed, were objects of great 
beauty ; the eye and the mind felt both stimulated 
and rested by a variety that was not confusion, by 
a splendor that in its several parts was harmonious 
and admirable. I have neglected to say that the 
carpet, which covered only the middle space of the 
room, resembled the walls in not being decorative 
in itself, but the base for decorative objects to 
stand upon. The pile was thick, the texture soft; 
figures it had none, its color being a warm gray 
with a red gleam in it ; there were upon it two or 
three rugs of rich dyes, which relieved what might 
otherwise have been a monotony of tone ; and the 
easel, the ample chairs, the cabinets, the screens, 
the divans, all stood painted, as it were, against 
this modest foil. The windows were studies. The 
curtains could at a touch be so swept aside as 
to let in the full splendor of the sun, or closed to 
shut it wholly out when desirable. But why des- 
cant upon these details, when not details but the 
rich oneness, the unity, the perfect ensemble., consti- 
tuted its supreme charm, its artistic claims.? Other 
rooms — " 

" Oh, describe no more ! " interrupted Bluff, im- 



58 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

patiently. " An upholsterer would do it better. All 
that can be said of your ideal house is that it is a 
museum, the different objects of which have been 
selected with care and an artistic perception of their 
relations to each other. At heart you are like the 
rest of the world just now — in love with toys, 
household confusion, and show. The other day I 
nearly broke my neck over Mrs. Clutter's tiger-rug. 
Why are there tiger-rugs, I demand to know ,'* 
Why must people, in blind subjection to the tyrant 
Fashion, make their houses preposterous curiosity- 
shops .'* Mrs. Clutter's house, and not your ideal, is 
the true example of the prevailing rage. She has 
shut out all the light from her windows with horse- 
hair curtains an inch thick, which once would not 
have been thought good enough for horse-blankets. 
She has laid down her floors in many-colored rugs 
so thickly that one might think himself in a carpet- 
dealer's ware-rooms ; and the visitor must be wary 
or he'll be tripped up by them at every step. She 
has covered her walls with gorgeous jugs, bowls, 
jars, urns, vases, of every conceivable variety, in 
which for the most part ingenuity in the way of 
ugly design has done its worst. She has hung 
screens in her doorways, and cabinets over her 
mantels. She has mounted old brass fire-dogs over 
her book-shelves, and planted emblazoned shields 



MR. BLUFF'S IDEAL OF A HOUSE. 59 

of metal over her door-lintels. She has bought all 
the old worm-eaten furniture she could find, and 
asks you to sit on chairs that were made for man- 
kind before backbones were discovered. She has 
turned the gas out of the house, and illuminated it 
with painted candles. She goes to bed with a 
Roman candlestick, sleeps under a Moorish rug, 
eats off of cracked china discovered in a Marble- 
head fisherman's cottage, wears a mediaeval gown 
that is all straight lines ; and she talks all day of 
Medicean porcelain, of Roman amphorce^ and Etrus- 
can vases ; of gres de Flandre, Dutch delft, and 
Raffaellesque and mezza-majolica ; of Palissy and 
Henri Deux, of Chinese celestial blue and crackle, 
of Japanese cloisonn^^ old Satsuma, and Hispano-Mo- 
resque, of Sevres and pdte-sur-pdte., of Chippendale 
and Eastlake furniture, of Queen Anne and Re- 
naissance and Marie Antoinette, and so on ad infi- 
nitum^ with a skill at quoting catalogues and run- 
ning off names that is amazing. Is this a true 
house that is made up of curious trifles from the 
shops — that is simply a chaos of colors, knick- 
knacks, and all forms of fantastic foolishness .'' Are 
there breadth, humanity, heart, life, dignity, intellect, 
felicity, in this jumble of misnamed art } Unless 
art broadens the imagination and stirs the faculties, 
there is no excuse for its being ; but the art that 



6o BACHELOR BLUFF. 

Mrs. Clutter is prostrate before dwarfs the imagina- 
tion, narrows the intellect, and impoverishes the 
whole nature. She has no sympathy with men and 
women ; it is all absorbed by her teacups and sau- 
cers. She has no perceptions of life except as a 
surrender of the mind to her paltry toys, and she 
is more concerned in the downfall of a cracked 
plate than in the wars and calamities that afflict 
the world outside of her bazaar. Her children are 
hidden away in nurseries ; she dares not permit 
them to bring their active bodies and restless spir- 
its into her rooms, lest they knock down her glass 
screens or break her precious jars. Emphatically, 
Mrs. Clutter's variety-shop is not a home. Now, as 
you have set forth your dream of an ideal house, 
let me picture mine. 

" Your ideal is a town-house : let me go into 
the country for mine. The house that comes up 
in m.y imagination has breadth, largeness, and sim- 
plicity. It is honest, serene, and hospitable. It is 
not a castor-box with many towers and turrets and 
roofs ; it is not a jumble of ill-contrived rooms ; it 
is not a pagoda, nor an ornamental chalet, nor an 
Italian villa. It is not a dry-goods box crushed 
under the weight of a Mansard-roof, like a small 
boy under his grandfather's hat. There are no fan- 
cies, nor fantastic devices, nor contortions, nor cheap 



MR. BLUFF'S IDEAL OF A HOUSE. 6l 

attempts at loud decoration, in the house that I see 
in my mind's eye. It has no cupola, real or make- 
believe; but it has two or three genuine balconies, 
and it is without even that universal favorite in 
our country, a gallery commonly (but erroneously) 
called a piazza." 

" I am glad in all your negatives to catch at 
one affirmative — there are balconies, which fact is 
a beginning, at least, of this shadowy nondescript. 
But why, in the name of summer comfort, do you 
abolish the veranda — or piazza, according to com- 
mon parlance .-* " 

*' Because the sun and the light and the air 
must enter with ease and breadth into the house I 
imagine — and covet. An ample porch gives every 
facility for summer al fresco sitting and reading 
that a veranda does. The house of my fancy sits 
low. Its wide door is approached by a broad and 
deep covered porch, whose paved foundation lifts 
but a few inches above the grass that encompasses 
it on its three open sides. The windows each side 
of the porch are also wide and low, with eglantine 
and honeysuckle twining around them. These flow- 
ering vines keep out neither air nor light, but send 
into the recesses of the rooms a summer fragrance 
that is always delicious and refreshing. They are 
better studies in colors than painted tiles ; they are 



62 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

more radiant in beauty than cloisonnd or majolica; 
they give to the interior a charm which Mrs. Clut- 
ter's most desperate efforts can not even hint at ; 
their freshness, sweetness, and beauty, fill all the 
space with fascination. Your veranda-inclosed house 
banishes this bric-a-brac of Nature to a distance. In 
my ideal house sweet blossoms must grow at its 
feet, they must twine lovingly about its windows, 
their odors must enter its rooms, and their fresh- 
ness give perennial charm to the life within. I do 
not imagine many details in the exterior of the 
house. There are balconies, as I have said, that 
are not make-believe adjuncts, but ample and ser- 
viceable structures, which permit me and mine to 
sit within them under the open sky, shadowed only 
by the branches of the trees that stand all around 
the house. I see also pointed gables, and chimneys 
of carved brick after the old, quaint, Tudor fashion. 
The house is not of wood, that at one time dazzles 
with the glare of new paint, and at another is 
ragged and out-at-elbows, as it were, with weather- 
stains and dilapidation. It is of stone that softens 
and grows mellow with the passing years, that gath- 
ers tone, and not stains, from the rain and the sun- 
shine, and which permits the vines to cling to it 
without getting rotten and sodden under them. 
Can we ever have houses that will fill us with a 



MR. BLUFF'S IDEAL OF A HOUSE. 63 

sense of their strength and perpetuity, as if their 
foundations were deep, their walls a protection, their 
roof an aegis, if we continue to build our frail 
structures of clapboards ? 

" But let me change the scene. I can not re- 
lease you until you have seen my ideal house — a 
plain, practical sort of ideal so far, as you concede 
— in its winter interior." 

" I do not see that your house differs essentially 
from many mansions in England." 

"Where, among countless ugly structures, are 
many that are admirable ideals of the rural house. 
If we ingraft some of the best features of English 
picturesque cottages upon the best features of their 
manors, with a hint or two borrowed from our own 
architecture, we shall have a country-house that is 
ideal only because it does not exist, it being quite 
as easy of accomplishment as are the strange mon- 
sters that spring up in the suburbs of every town 
in the country. 

" But let me take you into my winter-rooms, as 
I picture them. In that season we have the liveliest 
sense of the beneficence, serenity, and comfort, of 
home. And here let me paint my scene by freely 
using negatives and contrasts. Those suburban mon- 
strosities of which I have spoken keep out the wind 
and the rain, and here ends pretty much every real 



64 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

service they render. They have no felicities. The 
floors are covered usually with glaring carpets ; the 
chilling white walls of the rooms are ornamented 
with dreary, black engravings, or with hideous 
chromos. The fireplace is banished, and the sole 
warmth is from the sickening stove or the more 
sickening furnace. There are often books to read, 
for Americans have intellectual capacity even with 
low artistic perceptions. Newspapers and maga- 
zines, at least, abound ; and there is inevitably a 
piano. But the scene is chilling and dreary. There 
is no feeling of repose or ease ; nothing to charm 
the senses into restfulness. This is too often the 
picture of our suburban, and sometimes of our ur- 
ban, interiors. 

" I have a dream of another scene. The snow 
whirls and scurries without ; the trees sway and 
groan in the wind ; the sky and land are darkening 
as the shadows of night come apace — so let us en- 
ter. Ah, here is compensation ! There is blaze, 
there is warmth, there is light, there is an over- 
flowing of strange beauty. The walls, you quickly 
see, are not of chilling plaster that peels and chips 
off; nor of paint that is always hard and artistically 
unmanageable; nor of paper that stains so readily, 
and which ever obtrudes its senseless patterns. 
They are wainscoted to the cornice with wood 



MR. BLUFF'S IDEAL OF A HOUSE. 65 

crossed by a dado-rail, and ornamented with a few 
incised carvings. The wood is shellacked or stained 
of a reddish tint, which catches and reflects the 
light from candles or fire -blaze with rich effect. A 
vast chimney, which is a fine piece of architectural 
projection, has an open fireplace, in which logs are 
blazing. The mantel is heavy, and holds spreading 
candelabra, and a vase or two. Even a little bric- 
a-brac enters my country-house — but very little, be 
certain. Upon the walls hang several pictures of 
superb color — rich, still-life subjects that glow in 
deep tones, and catch radiant lights from the blaze 
on the hearth. Still-life subjects are chosen because 
this room with its dark walls might be somber were 
there not marked foci of color. But it is not som- 
ber. The floor, as I see it, is warm with a central 
carpet of rich dyes. There are large tables, massive 
and commodious chairs, many books — books are, 
indeed, abundant ; they lie on the tables, and fill 
low shelves that skirt two sides of the room. Warm- 
colored stuffs hang over the windows to exclude 
intruding draughts of air, and doors open into 
an adjoining room similarly furnished, save that a 
hospitable sideboard looks festive with china and 
glass. 

" Mark what it is that I see in my vision — a 
room of space, color, light, and tone; where there 



66 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

is neither emptiness nor profusion, neither glitter nor 
dreariness; where there are breadth and substance, 
charm for the eye, restfulness for the soul, anima- 
tion for the spirit. 

" And, after all, what is any picture unless human 
life comes in to grace it? I see in my dream fair 
girls on summer days sitting in the framework of 
my vine-trellised windows ; I watch in my winter 
vision young women in soft, graceful drapery mov- 
ing resplendent in the glow of the fire-light; I hear 
merry voices, and see bright faces, and catch the 
gleam of tender eyes ; and over all broods the 
spirit of harmony and peace. This is my ideal. 
Art is there, but it is a handmaid, not a tyrannical 
fashion. There are correctness without severity, sim- 
plicity without baldness, decoration without fussi- 
ness, beauty without frivolity, and every place is for 
occupancy, and everything for use. We eat un- 
der similar pleasant conditions ; our chambers have 
warm hangings, cheerful blaze on their hearths, 
good pictures on their walls. Handsome boys and 
fair girls give felicity to this house, and they bor- 
row from it their profoundest peace. Let each 
man put into his dream the house that he loves — 
I have given you with off-hand touches the ideal 
of mine." 

The Bachelor paused. Was that a mist that 



MR. BLUFF'S IDEAL OF A HOUSE. 67 

dimmed his eyes ? Who shall say what memories 
of " handsome boys and fair girls " once alive in 
his fancy, but which a perverse fate had rendered 
impossible, were now bringing that dew to his eye- 
lids ? 



V. 



MR. BLUFF ON FEMININE TACT AND 
INTUITIONS. 

{In the Drawing-Room^ 

Miranda, 
Bachelor Bluff. 

*' You must admit, Mr. Bluff," remarked Miran- 
da, in her smoothest and most persuasive tones, 
"that women are superior to men in their intui- 
tions." 

" Admit it ! " exclaimed Bachelor Bluff, sharply, 
yet with a strenuous effort to be polite and deferen- 
tial toward the charming young lady who had 
uttered this bit of philosophy — "admit it! No, 
madam, I deny it emphatically ; in fact, I affirm 
there never was a more unfounded, brazen, and au- 
dacious piece of humbug." 

" Really, Mr. Bluff, you are too eccentric. Does 
not every one say that, while man is forced to reach 
his conclusions by laborious processes of reasoning, 



MR, BLUFF ON FEMININE TACT, ETC. 69 

woman leaps to hers by swift and unerring intui- 
tion?" 

" Yes, madam, we have been told so ceaselessly 
by novelists, social essayists, and would-be philoso- 
phers of the drawing-room ; in fact, the thing has 
been asserted so often, that many people accept it 
as a matter of course. I do not remember, indeed, 
of ever hearing the assertion disputed, or of meet- 
ing in any writings of an attempt to examine its 
foundations. Nevertheless, the theory is entirely 
without support. There is not only not the slight- 
est evidence in its favor, but all the facts distinctly 
indicate that there is no such thing. Shall I ex- 
pound, madam .^ — or perhaps you do not care to 
hear a favorite theory ruthlessly trampled upon." 

" Oh, go on, by all means, Mr. Bluff. We all 
know your reputation for original notions. We must 
call you the drawing-room iconoclast, for you at- 
tack all our favorite ideas." 

" Let me, madam, rehearse the evidence, and then 
say whether I attack favorite ideas wantonly or ig- 
norantly. In the first place, you must see that, if 
women have the power of perceiving facts or ac- 
quiring true knowledge by intuition, they are en- 
dowed with a sixth sense^ equipped in a way that 
must necessarily give them an advantage over men 
in all the affairs of life. In such a case women 



70 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

would be safer guides than men in almost every- 
thing, and especially in those things unsusceptible of 
proof, in which we are necessarily governed by our 
impressions. Women ought to be, admitting the 
theory to be true, very much better judges of char- 
acter than men. They would be furnished with 
means for more prompt decision in many emergen- 
cies. They would make fewer mistakes in social 
questions. They w^ould be better protected against 
the designs of scoundrels. They would be less sus- 
ceptible to delusions of the senses, and less easily 
led away by false logic. Intuitional perceptions be- 
ing the operation of a natural force, women who 
possess them would not only be able to reach re- 
sults sooner than men, but their conclusions would 
be more sound and trustworthy — for to reason right- 
ly requires training and experience, and consequent- 
ly, while men with little experience and no training 
would stumble greatly in their efforts to sift evi- 
dence and arrive at the truth, women would com- 
monly be right off-hand. Do you follow me, mad- 
am ? " 

" Oh, yes. So far you have shown that if women 
have intuitions they are more richly endowed than 
men. Well, Mr. Bluff, that is exactly what some of 
us think." 

" Then, madam, if your sex is more richly en- 



MR. BLUFF ON FEMININE TACT, ETC. 



71 



dowed in this way, your intuitions ought to serve 
you in affairs generally. Do they ? That is the 
test. Now, I have never been able to detect in 
women a special fitness for dealing with the prob- 
lems of life, big or little. If women have intuitional 
perceptions, they ought to be very successful specu- 
lators, and, though they can not well go into Wall 
Street themselves, Wall Street men would be sure in 
such case to act solely by the advice and direction 
of their wives ; and, if married brokers availed 
themselves of this power at their hand, they would 
soon drive bachelor brokers out of the field — or, at 
least, into matrimony. Every speculator with a wife 
would be sure, you see, of a fortune. Then, if the 
theory is true, no politician would ever make a 
move without first having consulted the intuitions 
of some accomplished woman. Women have some- 
times acted wise parts in politics." 

" And have not successful men," interrupted Mi- 
randa, " often acknowledged the great aid rendered 
by their wives .? Recollect Lord Beaconsfield, and 
what he says about the service woman was to him." 

" I do, madam ; and I greatly honor the woman 
who thus upholds the ambition and great purposes 
of her husband. But in these occasional instances 
the women have possessed superior intellect and 
good reasoning powers ; they have, you may be 



72 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

sure, aided the men along the lines the men have 
worked ; they have helped them to their ends by 
the highway of reason and judgment, and not se- 
duced them into morasses by promises of mysterious 
short cuts. In ordinary business, just as in more 
important matters, there is no evidence that intui- 
tion is worth anything, much less equal in value to 
experience, or that it in any way can be substituted 
for it. The trader, man or woman, who, instead of 
studying the market, bought and sold by intuition, 
would soon go to wreck." 

" But how about domestic life t " 

" In domestic life, madam, you will find that 
women do not secure more trusty friends than men 
do ; nor are they more successful than men in se- 
lecting servants. They do not adjust themselves 
more happily to the tempers and failings of com- 
panions ; nor more quickly perceive the consequences 
of a misspoken word; nor read character m^ore accu- 
rately ; nor exhibit more insight into the future — than 
the masculine sex does. In all these things there 
are great differences in individuals, but there is no 
evidence on record or attainable to show that the 
difference separates along the line of sex; or, if the 
separation is ever along the line of sex, it is against 
yours, madam — simply, however, because it has less 
knowledge of the world and is more impressible 



MR. BLUFF ON FEMININE TACT, ETC. 73 

than ours. It is notoriously the woman and not the 
man who is deceived by the soft manners and oily 
pretensions of the quack; it is the woman always 
who is overcome by the hypocritical unction of the 
Rev. Honeymans." 

" This is a formidable array of arguments against 
me. I must take time to consider them." 

" And yet, madam, I have not stated the most 
decided test of all. The most important event in 
the life of a woman, you will acknowledge, is the 
selection of a husband. In nothing else would a 
power of intuitional perception have a better oppor- 
tunity to evince itself, or be of greater service to 
the possessor. This may be fairly called a crucial 
test ; and the moment it is applied the theory falls 
to the ground utterly. That men, who confessedly 
are without intuitions, often make sad mistakes in 
selecting their life-companions, we all know ; but 
do they err, madam, as frequently as women do } 
Men are often fascinated by bad women, deluded 
by selfish, wrong-hearted women ; but of all hope- 
lessly blind creatures there is none to equal a young 
woman enamored of an unworthy man. Sometimes 
it is a smooth and plausible rake ; sometimes a 
showy, innately vulgar fellow with bad habits and 
atrocious tastes ; sometimes a man whose fiber is 

coarse, and who is sure to develop into a brutal 
4 



74 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



and tyrannical master ; sometimes it is a man whose 
cold and selfish heart is for the moment concealed 
under an affectation of sympathy and affection. In 
whatever guise the deceiver comes, the woman, in a 
majority of instances, is utterly deluded. She fails 
to see the mask, or to detect the real character that 
it hides. She refuses to listen to reason ; she will 
not believe the wise cautions of her friends ; she 
rejects evidence ; she will not listen to admonitions 
or warnings ; she insists upon trusting to her intui- 
tions, so called, and as a consequence her happi- 
ness is wrecked for life. How many woful, pitiful 
tragedies have occurred in this way ! " 

*•' I declare, Mr. Bluff, you can be quite pathetic ; 
and you are right too, I do believe." 

" Indisputably right, madam," said Mr. Bluff, ris- 
ing, and walking about excitedly ; " and it is mon- 
strous for people who ought to know better to talk 
of womanly intuitions in face of facts like these. 
They do, I tell you, incalculable injury. Instead of 
showing that reason is the only safe dependence, 
that all persons must be wary of hasty impressions, 
that we can not trust any guide but sound judg- 
ment, young women are brought up with the notion 
that they are endowed with a special talisman, that 
they possess an occult, mysterious, short-hand meth- 
od of getting at facts ; that they are not obliged to 



MR. BLUFF ON FEMININE TACT, ETC. 75 

sift evidence and weigh circumstances, but have only 
to trust implicitly to certain implanted impulses or 
instincts — and as a result they too frequently make 
appalling and irretrievable mistakes. There never 
was, I repeat, madam, a more unblushing and mon- 
strous humbug than this theory of womanly intui- 
tions, and, as it is infinitely mischievous, those who 
affirm it ought to be brought sharply to the bar of 
a revised public opinion. Do you not agree with 
me ? " 

" I am afraid," said the lady, " that we have de- 
luded ourselves in this way. Women are suscepti- 
ble, quick to take impressions, very ignorant of the 
world, and in their ignorance supremely confident in 
the truth of spontaneous impressions." 

" Many years ago, madam, a phrenologist as- 
sured me that I should always trust my first im- 
pressions, specially of men and women. 'You will,' 
he said, 'often reason yourself into another belief, 
and thereby be deceived ; for always the idea that 
you instantaneously form of a person is intuitively 
the right one.' Well, madam, I have never forgotten 
the advice, and I have tested it many times; and 
invariably the phrenologist's theory has been wrong. 
I have not been and am not able to form correct 
judgments of men and women off-hand. First im- 
pressions have been commonly very misleading. I 



76 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

have found it necessary to study a man well before 
fully measuring and comprehending his character, 
and I don't believe that other people are better off 
in this particular than I am. I do not mean that 
some faces are not obviously honest and open in 
their character, and others dark and suspicious. 
Very marked tendencies are probably never con- 
cealed; but much the larger number of men and 
'women have not distinctly marked tendencies, and 
these people can only be understood by some meas- 
ure of familiar acquaintance." 

" If you will not grant intuition to women," said 
the lady, " you will at least acknowledge their su- 
periority in all matters of tact and delicate manage- 
ment." 

" I absolutely have the temerity," replied the 
Bachelor, "to dispute even this theory." 

" Good gracious ! Mr. Bluff, will you not leave 
us anything.^ " 

" A thousand admirable virtues, madam ; but 
as to tact you possess it equally with men in all 
those things in which your experiences are equal to 
them, and your tact is superior in all things in 
which your experiences are greater. Tact, I sup- 
pose, may be defined as a quick and nice discern- 
ment, a prompt perception of circumstances and 
facts, a ready appreciation of other people's feelings 



MR. BLUFF ON FEMININE TACT, ETC. jy 

or tastes, a happy faculty in turning the corners 
and meeting the exigencies of social intercourse." 

" In all the many minor things of the drawing- 
room," said Miranda, "women are invariably more 
ready than men. Women acquire the manners, the 
ease, the air of the salon sooner than men do ; they 
are commonly more at home there; they are more 
vivacious, more sympathetic, quicker to see and 
act." 

"This difference," replied Mr. Bluff, "is, how- 
ever, more noticeable between young than between 
elderly people. The girl learns the art of society 
with ease, while the boy commonly undergoes a 
long and painful novitiate ; but the man of ma- 
turity, when also a gentleman, has acquired social 
deftness in all its phases, and is master of the art 
usually defined as tact. While we are often called 
upon to admire the skill and deftness of an accom- 
plished hostess, we shall find that an accomplished 
host receives his guests or presides at table with an 
art that is in no wise inferior. I will, however, 
concede that in the drawing-room women, as a rule, 
have more tact than men. But, when we extend 
our observation over a larger area, what do we dis- 
cover.? If we take up either domestic life, or busi- 
ness life, or the various organizations in which men 
and women gather, it is not apparent that women 



78 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

are more adroit or more skillful, or that they have 
nicer discernment or better perceptions than men. 
I am afraid, indeed, madam, that an impartial ex- 
amination of the evidence will show that, instead of 
men being more insensible and less adroit than 
women, they distinctly exhibit in important things 
a superior skill." 

" Humph ! this is rather a bold defiance of ac- 
cepted notions." 

" Let us scan the evidence, madam, and see. 
Is it not notorious that much the greater number 
of domestic quarrels originate among the women of 
the family.? The altercations and differences that 
so frequently exist between families united by mar- 
riage are almost always on the side of the women. 
Men are dragged in and become partisans in the 
warfare; but gauntlets are commonly first exchanged 
between the ladies. Assuredly, if tact is a quality 
desirable in the drawing-room as a sort of social 
buffer, smoothing sharp angles and softening col- 
lisions, the very field for it is the domestic hearth, 
where the unapt word, the ill-considered retort, or 
the loss of self-command, is so productive of mis- 
chief. Can it be asserted that in this domain wom- 
en, as a class, have more tact than men .'' Is peace 
between husband and wife more often maintained 
by the wise repression, the soft answer, the skillful 



MR. BLUFF ON FEMININE TACT, ETC, 79 

word, the adroit evasion of an issue, on the part of 
wives than of husbands? If we, madam, Asmodeus- 
like, could peep beneath the roofs of houses, which 
sex would we find most freely occupied in nagging? 
Which would we discover most commonly taking 
offense at the casual word? Which would be show- 
ing a superior skill in meeting and turning the dan- 
gerous little things that arise hourly in every cir- 
cle ? In that tact which teaches us when to hold 
our tongues and when to speak, what to see and 
what not to see, I suspect that the masculine part 
of the community may claim some little preeminence. 
Of course, I am generalizing here. We have all 
met with sweet-tempered wives and brutal husbands ; 
but among the average right-intentioned people it is 
a deficiency of tact that so often causes collisions, 
and this deficiency is at least common with both 
sexes. Young women, my dear lady, are very skill- 
ful in managing their lovers, but many of them too 
frequently lose their skill when they come to man- 
age their husbands." 

" How dreadfully tiresome it must be, Mr. Bluff, 
to be always so exceedingly judicial ! — and yet you 
are judicial without being just. Men are stolid and 
stupid; they don't quarrel because they are so in- 
tensely selfish and indifferent. Women are quicker, 
and more susceptible; they have warmer feelings; 



8o BACHELOR BLUFF. 

they are more impulsive; they are moved sooner to 
righteous indignation; they are — " 

"All that you say; no doubt it is more difficult 
for a woman to suppress her indignation, to conceal 
irritation, to ignore unpleasantness, to feel or affect 
indifference ; but you , see, madam, we are not in- 
quiring into causes, but as to the fact. Women are 
declared to have more tact than men ; so they have 
in some social things ; but in important things I 
think not. It is, for instance, the lack of tact on 
the part of women that sets clique against clique in 
congregations, and in church societies of all kinds; 
that causes almost all associations organized by 
women to break up in differences; that keeps so 
many people in hot water in family hotels and 
boarding-houses, or wherever lovely woman pre- 
dominates. It is to a lack of tact that we owe the 
traditional mother-in-law. Fathers-in-law have no 
bad reputations anywhere. May I not say this is 
because they have too much tact to interfere, too 
much tact to take notice of trifles, too much tact to 
be fussy and irritating in matters that should be 
wisely left alone 1 

" Does any woman realize how much tact men 
are found to exhibit in order to successfully keep 
their place in life t It has been shrewdly doubted, 
you know, whether clubs would be possible with 



MR. BLUFF ON FEMININE TACT, ETC. 8l 

ladies — not merely because they have not the club 
disposition, but because they can not abide together 
without getting into hostile divisions. It takes a 
good deal of tact to meet daily on familiar and 
equal terms with numerous persons, and keep all 
irritating things out of sight. The club is possible 
in the highest civilization only because nothing but 
the self-repression that comes of the highest social 
training permits men of diverse interests and tastes 
to come together harmoniously. The club affords 
an excellent test of tact ; and if men are better 
adapted than women for club-life, if they can live 
together in this way without collisions, they have 
established the possession of tact more effectually 
than even the requirements of the drawing-room es- 
tablish it for women. 

" Then, it is impossible for one to succeed in 
any of the professions without the exercise of a 
great deal of tact. A lawyer must possess it su- 
premely, not only in dealing with obstinate and pas- 
sionate clients, but in the court-room, with judges, 
juries, and witnesses. A physician must possess it 
to a degree that only comes from a fortunate tem- 
perament and long practice. He must evade, hu- 
mor, cajole, please, keep his temper, repress his im- 
patience, hold himself well in hand, and know always 
how to answer questions by saying something that 



82 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

means nothing. A clergyman must be endowed with 
tact, or he will soon be on the rocks. He must 
keep in good-humor opposing cliques, bear patiently 
with ignorance and self-assertion, deal with caprice 
as if it were wisdom, and know how to harmonize 
the ever-ruffling matrons of his flock. The tact 
that men exhibit in these ways certainly excels that 
which a woman displays in managing the wholly 
willing material of a dancing party or a pleasure 
expedition." 

" I declare, Mr. Bluff, one should never open a 
subject with you until she has studied it for weeks." 

" One more illustration, madam, and I have 
done. The supremest exhibition of tact is to be 
found in the Congressional or political leader. A 
statesman representing a party or a faction is pressed 
on all sides with conflicting interests, obliged to har- 
monize discordant materials, to be patient with impa- 
tience, to cover up the mistakes of indiscreet zeal, 
to utter the timely word that heals accidental wounds, 
and the appreciative word that rewards the voluntary 
service ; he must know when to advance upon oppo- 
nents and when to withdraw; how to regulate and 
adjust endless diversities of passion, ambition, selfish- 
ness, and intrigue. In men placed in these supreme 
and trying situations, we often find a tact that 
amounts almost to inspiration. And while it can 



MR, BLUFF ON FEMININE TACT, ETC. 83 

not be safely said that women similarly trained and 
similarly placed would be unequal to men, it is at 
least idle to talk of the superior tact of women in 
face of the fact that all great opportunities for the 
display of this talent, and all great manifestations of 
it, are confined exclusively to men — to the sex which 
it is fashionable to characterize as clumsy and blun- 
dering." 

"Do you think, Mr. Bluff," said the lady, look- 
ing up into the Bachelor's face archly, *' that you 
have shown much tact in saying all these unhand- 
some things about my sex to me, a woman } " 

"Yes, madam, the very best tact in the world. 
For I counted on your good sense, and believed 
that with you, as with any superior woman, I could 
venture to speak with entire frankness and confi- 
dence." 



VI. 

MR. BLUFF ON REALISM IN ART. 

{On the Lawn, on a Summer Afternoon^ 

Bachelor Bluff, 
An Artist. 

Bachelor Bluff {throwing down a magazine). 
Really, Macbeth's " nothing is but what is not " 
applies to critical canons more than to anything 
else. Everything escapes, eludes, vanishes, is trans- 
formed under the Protean changes of critical dog- 
mas. Do any class agree, for instance, as to what 
art is or what it should be.'' It is spiritual insight, 
says one ; it is pure sensuousness, utters another ; it 
is a story told to the eye, affirms a third ; it is not 
a story at all, but a scheme of color, declares a 
fourth; it is a dream on canvas or in marble, says 
a fifth ; it is the simple truth of nature, asserts some 
one else ; it is creation ; it is selecting and combin- 
ing; it is technical skill plus imagination; it is join- 
ing or putting together with or without imagination; 



MR. BLUFF ON REALISM IN ART. g^ 

it is — well, it seems to be whatever anybody may 
ingeniously suppose it to be. 

Artist. Art, of course, is scientifically undefinable, 
just as wit and humor and other abstract qualities 
are. It is conceded now, however, that true art is 
not imitation, but creation ; that it begins where im- 
agination begins; that it is evinced by something 
which the artist puts into his picture from the 
depths of his own soul, by the beauty evolved from 
himself and infused into his work. 

Bluff. Yes, I know. Art is not art unless it gets 
its head in the clouds, until it ceases to be some- 
thing measurable and comprehensible, and loses itself 
in a mist. This is the dogma of the new aesthetic 
and ecstatic school. Giving the school all the re- 
spect that by the utmost stretch is its due, all that 
can be said is that this is the definition of sensuous 
imaginative art. I say sensuous imaginative, for all 
this transcendental art is, at bottom, of the earth, 
earthy — it is ultra-sensuous, an intoxication of color 
and form. A definition of art that embraces only a 
part of the facts, that excludes nineteen twentieths 
of the things that are commonly included in art, is 
certainly as arbitrary as it is inadequate. There 
are imaginative art, graphic art, picturesque art, 
decorative art, and the average man has no diffi- 
culty whatever in determining what things belong 



86 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

to art and what do not. It is only when a mind 
of unscientific training feels called upon to define, 
that confusion ensues. And this confusion arises 
mainly from confounding degree with kind^ as there 
are people who insist that poetry means something 
exalted, whereas it only means a definite form of 
literary expression. It is not imagination, nor im- 
agery, nor beauty, that distinguishes poetry from 
prose, but simply metrical arrangement. In the 
same way it is not imagination, nor mystery, nor 
spirituality, nor exaltation of any kind, that makes 
art, for these things relate only to degree and 
quality, to certain phases of art. Art begins at the 
beginning; it is in the rude sculpture of the Egyp- 
tian or the Aztec, in the tentative and often gro- 
tesque efforts of the earliest painters, in the crude 
sketch of the novice. 

Artist. But art assuredly must mean performance, 
and not mere attempt at performance. It must have 
some significance, some thought, some appeal to the 
higher feelings. It must reveal to us forms of 
beauty, and awaken in us spiritual pleasure. If 
your idea is pushed to the extreme, then art must 
include every form of mere mechanical execution, 
every piece of unimaginative literalism, every form 
of feeble manipulation. No one will assent to your 
judgment. Art begins this side of mechanism, and 



MR. BLUFF ON REALISM IN ART. 87 

this side of every form of literalism ; its essential 
quality is — 

Bluff. What? That is the whole question. If 
we can find the essential quality of art, the indis- 
putable something the presence of which can be 
detected, we shall have a definition of art. 

Artist. Is it not beauty.^ 

Bluff. Beauty covers a vast field in art, and we 
often hear it declared to be its real purpose. The 
real purpose of art is not so easily ascertained. 
That beauty is not the essential quality of art is 
evident from the fact that very ugly scenes in nat- 
ure have been painted with such vigor and skill as 
to fairly captivate the beholder. Some of the French 
landscapists will fascinate you with a marsh, a few 
stunted, deformed trees, and a sky. A symmetrical 
tree gives us the lines of beauty, but there isn't an 
artist anywhere that doesn't prefer twisted, mis- 
shapen trees to symmetrical ones. There is more 
character in them, he will say. But yet character 
does not make art. Some artists with us seem fairly 
to detest beauty. They wish to be bold, strong, 
virile; and they appear to delight in ugliness. The 
impressionists think themselves preeminently artists, 
yet their claims to art lie in the exclusion of form, 
of color, of meaning, and of every suggestion of 
beauty — as beauty is commonly understood. No ; 



88 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

beauty is only one factor in art. Art may awaken 
sensations of awe or of sympathy ; it may be weird, 
gaunt, grotesque, and melancholy ; it may deal with 
storm, turbulence, anger, passion, death. It has, in 
fact, the whole field of expression, and is as catholic 
as life and the world. 

Artist. I do not dispute its range of expression, 
although art continually makes excursions into fields 
where it does not legitimately belong. But, while 
the range of expression may be wide, the range of 
performance has its limits. Not every one who says 
" I am an artist " really reaches to art. 

Bluff. To worthy art, I grant. But I wish to scru- 
tinize this notion that art begins somewhere with 
the beginning of the ideal. When I turn over an 
artist's portfolios I find scores of sketches — now the 
trunk of a tree, now a head or figure, now a mass 
of rocks, now a study of a ruin, now a bit of coast. 
Are these things not art ? Meissonier once, when 
dining, caught up a burned match and, half forget- 
fully, began drawing a figure on the tablecloth. 
The host quietly thrust other burned matches in his 
way ; and so spirited was the figure drawn in this 
spontaneous way that the delighted host afterward 
had the cloth framed. Was not this sketch art.? 
Are not Detaille's single military figures art.? Are 
not Tenniel's cartoons and Du Maurier's capital so- 



MR. BLUFF ON REALISM IN ART. 89 

cial sketches in " Punch " to be considered as art ? 
Is not an etching by Haden or Unger art ? Is not 
an Etruscan vase, a piece of majolica ware, an old 
bit of repousse silver-work, a piece of carving by 
Gibbons, art ? Come, where will you draw the line ? 

Artist. By a cheap license of speech, art covers 
almost everything that people desire to make it 
cover. There are art tailors and art boot-makers, 
you know. A term that is made to mean every- 
thing soon ceases to mean anything. I must insist 
upon it that art, in its fullness and completeness, 
means imaginative and creative putting together. I 
have no inclination to consider the innumerable idle 
things that borrow its name. 

Bluff. In one sense you are right. There is im- 
aginative work in all genuine art, but it is that 
power of imagination which enables one to see 
things as they are, and grasp all the facts. Realism 
is absolutely a very high order of imagination. Look, 
now, at yonder group of trees, with tints just glint- 
ing their upper branches as presage of the coming 
sunset. You will say, perhaps, that copying those 
trees would be mechanical and not art work. And 
yet, to copy them as they are, to catch their grace, 
their form, their lines, their tints, their play of light 
and shade, their hundred vivid characteristics, could 
never be done by a cold, mechanical mind. To 



90 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

paint those trees the artist must penetrate them, ap- 
propriate them, master them. The forces within him 
must stir, his mind must awaken, his eye be full of 
alertness, his soul open itself to their unspeakable 
fascinations, his whole being glow with a sense of 
their wonders. And I tell you there is not a rock, 
a tree, a branch, a flower, a hillside, a sweep of 
wave, a play of light, a touch of color, that, if re- 
produced with all its expression in form and tint, 
would not delight you. The painter need not draw 
upon his imagination by an atom. The thing itself, 
if it is the whole, true, full thing, is enough. And 
observe, all cold or mechanical copying never gets 
within a hundred degrees of the real facts. Do you 
think that it would be mere mechanism, mere deft- 
ness of hand, to draw the horse in the meadow be- 
yond us } Mere deftness would give you nothing 
more than a wooden horse. It takes the very high- 
est skill to give the lines, the sense of power, the 
truth of motion, the real life of the animal — and it 
has never yet been done by any one whose pencil 
was not guided by imaginative force. " The per- 
ception of beauty and power in whatever objects or 
in whatever degree they subsist," says Hazlitt, "is 
the test of real genius." So you see there is imagi- 
nation in art; not the imagination that certain writ- 
ers mean, not the dreaming that strives for the light 



MR. BLUFF ON REALISM IN ART. 91 

that never was on sea or land, but the immense force 
and susceptibility that master and possess the light 
that is on sea and land. 

Artist. This is making realism a branch of im- 
agination, facts as potent as poetry, things that are 
as exalted as things that we dream. 

Bluff. For my part, I haven't the slightest objec- 
tion to people seeing visions, but prefer that they 
should begin by seeing facts. The sculptor who 
translates all the thousand expressions that exist in 
the human figure will rival the Greek Phidias ; the 
landscapist who possesses himself with all the facts 
of nature will outdo all his competitors. I point 
again to my group of trees ; who will come and 
paint them ? — not feebly and vaguely, but reproduce 
them in all their splendor. Who will do it.? You 
would find a hundred idealists to one with percep- 
tions and hand vigorous enough for the task. Ideal- 
ism is in fact the cheapest thing in the world ; so 
far from its being that which cultivated people only 
can comprehend, as the critics are constantly assum- 
ing, it is distinctly the thing that the crude, untrained 
public admire. See the wide fame of Dore. Here 
is an artist that, in black-and-white at least, meets all 
the theoretical requirements of your school. He has 
immense fecundity, boundless resources, and affluent 
imagination ; he is utterly regardless of nature or 



g2 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

truth, securing his effects by the most audacious ex- 
aggeration — and yet, while the public delight in his 
work, it is quite the fashion among artists and crit- 
ics to sneer at it. His exuberant imagination leads 
him to extravagance, to theatrical sensation, to 
strained and untruthful delineations, to endless vio- 
lence to the simplicity and truth of nature. And 
these things, which, if your set is right, ought to be 
virtues, are things which the better informed sum 
up against him as sins. They are of a character, 
let me say, which in the constitution of the human 
mind are sure to mark all affluent and over-teeming 
minds. The susceptible and uncritical public find 
pleasure in these manifestations of power, but acute 
and cultured people prefer the modest beauty of 
nature. Then there is Bouguereau. It has become 
quite the fashion recently to sneer at this painter 
because his flesh-tints are so smooth, so merely 
pretty and refined, so devoid of robust vigor and 
vivid truth. Obviously these fault-finders are all 
wrong. It is not truth that is wanted. Bouguereau's 
imagination is on the side of sweet tints, of ideal 
grace and delicacy ; he paints nude figures through 
a haze of tender beauty. What right have any of 
us to complain, however lacking in virile force his 
work may be ? Great artists are not realists, say 
the critics— they do not paint, says Hamerton, what 



MR. BLUFF ON REALISM IN ART. 93 

is but what is 7iot. Hence, in Bouguereau's paint- 
ings, we must accept the artist's conception of flesh, 
not flesh as we know it and see it. 

Artist. Every truly great painter paints nature 
not as it is, but as it enters his imagination. Art 
ceases to be art by becoming imitation. 

Bluff. This word vnitation is very confusing and 
misleading. If by imitation is meant deceptive imita- 
tion — the painting of objects with such servile fidel- 
ity as to deceive one into the belief that he is looking 
upon real things — the thing is paltry enough. But 
I do not use the word imitation. Drawing the out- 
lines of a tree, according to Ruskin, is not imitating a 
tree, but giving the form of a tree. The question is 
between nature sweetened and idealized, as a man 
may sleepily dream it, or nature seized upon with all 
the force and spring of the mind, so as to make it 
captivatingly faithful. Now, one who paints nature 
as he sees it paints it as it is so far as he can real- 
ize it ; if he does not see it as it is, his vision is 
abnormal, and assuredly this unfits him for the voca- 
tion. If he consciously paints it as it is not, paint- 
ing it neither as it is nor as he sees it, what have 
we, then, but an artist substituting a fancy, a no- 
tion, a perverse and intentional fallacy, for the veri- 
ties of creation ? Such notions might in some in- 
stances be good, but have they any just reason for 



94 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

their being, and could they be more glorious than 
great Nature ? And then, just as sure as we admit 
the principle that an artist may paint his own con- 
ceptions as nature, we shall open the door for every 
conceivable outcome of vanity, foolishness, and gro- 
tesque fancy — such as would soon cast art into a 
pit of darkness and delirium. 

Artist. A majority of painters see only the sur- 
face of things ; they depict the beauty of the external 
world exclusively, being wholly insensible to the soul 
of nature, which it is the true province of genius to 
depict and express. 

Bluff. Yes ; of course if there are painters who 
are spokesmen of the external aspects of nature 
only, and others who are prophets of its internal 
spirit, then the latter must obviously be much great- 
er artists. But what is this internal spirit .? How is 
it separated from outside phenomena ? What are 
the special qualities not revealed in surfaces that 
certain gifted men discover and express .^ Let us 
see if we can penetrate beneath the surface of this 
theory. When any one is contemplating a scene in 
nature, he is impressed by the variety and beauty 
of fortfi^ by the infinite gradations and felicitous con- 
trasts of color^ by the vivid effects of light and shad- 
ow^ by the rich differences of texture^ by the mellow- 
ing influences of the atmosphere^ by a sense of 



MR. BLUFF ON REALISM IN ART. 95 

expansion that comes from space. These are the 
things that every artist studies and endeavors to re- 
produce ; and the success of the painter in each 
case will depend upon his skill in mastering rela- 
tively all the different conditions presented to him. 
If he enters too minutely into every detail, his pict- 
ure, by the multiplication of particulars, will, as a 
whole, lose all resemblance ; if he omits those par- 
ticulars that are necessary to make up the sense of 
the whole, his picture will lack truth and virility. 
The artist must have a strong capacity for seeing 
all that is before him, and an artistic perception that 
enables him to decide rightly the separate circum- 
stances that he must either reject or subordinate. 
If he is of a cold, dull mind, he works patiently on, 
photographically copying what he sees ; if he is of 
an imaginative, susceptible nature, he seizes salient 
beauties, he gives full value to an effect here, he sup- 
presses one there, he throws into the composition ideas 
drawn from former experiences. But what possible 
thing can he put on his canvas that is not a ** report 
of surfaces " } He begins with form ; no man can 
invent lines or combinations of lines that are not in 
nature, and they have no possible characteristics 
that are not external. He proceeds to color, and is 
here so bewildered and embarrassed by the richness 
of nature, the exquisite gradations that no skill can 



96 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

master, the overwhelming loveliness of tints that his 
pigments can only hint at, that he is in despair — 
but color, nevertheless, is a thing of surfaces. He 
next struggles with texture. How can he suggest 
the tooth of the rock, the edge of the bark, the 
porcelain of the rose, is his problem — and texture is 
the very crust of things, beyond which it is not his 
mission to penetrate. Light and shade, and atmos- 
phere, are simply external things that modify other 
external things, that either soften or make con- 
trasts, define or blend lines, articulate foregrounds 
or mellow distances. If after form, color, texture, 
light and shade, atmosphere, and space — all being 
external aspects — there are other conditions, what 
are they ? How is the " soul of things " expressed 
otherwise than by obvious phenomena ? If a thing 
is not obvious, how is it detected 1 Are there spir- 
itual landscapes similar to the alleged spiritual pho- 
tographs } Is the soul of things a ghost that proph- 
ets or seers only can behold } In the group of trees 
we have been studying there is marvelous beauty : 
remove light and shade, and the picture becomes 
dull ; extinguish color, and its charm has almost 
gone ; obliterate interlacing lines, and it is charac- 
terless ; but it seems there is a soul left. Well, this 
soul must be the sort of divinity that we see in a 
telegraph-pole or a wood-pile ! No ; it is certain 



MR. BLUFF ON REALISM IN ART. 



97 



that there is no internal soul of things separable 
from the aspects of things ; the difference we find 
in the works of painters is not an imaginary line 
of this character — it is the difference of power, the 
difference between one who sees and comprehends 
vigorously and one who feebly or only half sees, the 
difference between susceptibility and unsusceptibility. 
Instead of a painter inventing a nature of his own, 
trying to see things in lights and under aspects dif- 
ferent from the way other people see them, his real 
mission is to passionately study nature, to penetrate 
it, to take possession of it, to enter into its subtil- 
ties, to master its mysteries, to see it with the heart 
and soul as well as with the eye, in order that he 
may reproduce it intense, powerful, virile, glorious ! 

Artist. The conflict between imaginative art and 
realistic art is not likely to be soon settled, and 
each man judges, doubtless, as he feels. But we 
started with the purpose of defining art, and have 
drifted greatly. Can we find a definition th^t is 
likely to be generally acceptable ? 

Bluff. The definition should be broad enough to 
cover the whole, or nearly the whole field, and that 
includes indispensable elements. How would it do 
to say that art is fonn, or form and color so combined 
or expressed as to awakeii se?isations of pleasure ? 

Artist. I do not think this will do. Vulgar form 
5 



98 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

or color may, for instance, awaken sensations of 
pleasure in vulgar minds, and very good form or 
color fails to impress stupid and insensible minds. 

Bluff. I am well aware that it is not a perfect 
or complete definition, such a definition as would 
enable one always, by applying it, to determine 
whether any given performance is art or not. It 
wouJd be impossible, moreover, to define art so as 
to enlighten vulgar or stupid minds. But it is a 
definition that covers a tolerably wide range of con- 
ditions, and it is one which, if accepted, would stop 
a good deal of current nonsense — the nonsense that 
sets up a set of narrow dogmas and aims to turn 
out of the pale everybody's ideas and performances 
that do not coincide with them. It permits the 
ideal and includes the graphic ; it recognizes pretty 
nearly the whole range of work usually characterized 
as art. 

Artist. Have you not said that art deals with 
awe, sympathy, turbulence, passion, and death .? 

Bluff. These may be its themes ; but form and 
color are the media through which these things are 
expressed, and determine the art-character of the 
work — sometimes too much so, for the conception 
of an event is often overlooked by artists in consid- 
ering exclusively the technical treatment. However, 
if you do not like my definition, frame a better one. 



VII. 



MR. BLUFF DISCOURSES OF THE COUN- 
TRY AND KINDRED THEMES. 

{In a Country Lane.) 

Bachelor Bluff. 
A Listener. 

"The country," exclaimed Mr. Bluff, with 



an air of candor and impartiality, "is, I admit, a 
very necessary and sometimes a very charming place. 
I thank Heaven for the country when I eat my first 
green peas, when the lettuce is crisp, when the po- 
tatoes are delicate and mealy, when the well-fed 
poultry comes to town, when the ruddy peach and 
the purple grape salute me at the fruit-stands. I 
love the country when I think of a mountain ram- 
ble ; when I am disposed to wander with rod and 
reel along the forest-shadowed brook; when the 
apple-orchards are in blossom; when the hills blaze 
with autumn foliage. But I protest against the dog- 
matism of rural people, who claim all the cardinal 



lOO BACHELOR BLUFF. 

and all the remaining virtues for their rose-beds and 
cabbage-patches. The town, sir, bestows felicities 
higher in character than the country does ; for men 
and women, and the works of men and women, are 
always worthier our love and concern than the rocks 
and the hills. Contact with mind, with imagination, 
with fancy, with ideas and aspirations and discus- 
sions, with men of wit and purpose and intellect- 
ual life, is worth to the mind and to character 
more than dumb Nature at her best can bestow. 
That is the best-fortified soul which has experienced 
the fullness of town and the sweetness of country 
life ; but nothing can be more absurd than the airs 
of superior moral and mental status which suburban 
folk so often assume. Life must be largely enriched 
with those experiences that pertain to a metropolis 
before one can be fully capable of enjoying the 
charms of rural retirement. Men must have the 
ceaseless friction of mankind in order to live ripely 
and develop fully. There have been great men and 
lovable men who have proclaimed their preference 
for these paved concourses of men. No man can 
justly accuse me of trivial tastes with the example 
of old Dr. Johnson before him; and who would not 
have rather walked down Fleet Street with the hon- 
est old Ursa Major than sit droning and dozing 
for a decade under a vine and fig-tree t And 



MR. BLUFF DISCOURSES OF THE COUNTRY, loi 

heroic Charles Lamb ! Who may not love the 
shop - windows, the chop - houses, the theatres, the 
book-stalls, the town-sights of all sorts, when the 
noble Elia has wandered through and among them, 
drawing the happiest images, the most playful hu- 
mor, the rarest fancy, the sweetest sentiments from 
them ? After Charles Lamb all men may rise up 
and bless the streets ! And then have we not also 
delightful Leigh Hunt and witty Douglas Jerrold in 
the ranks of the town's defenders ? And then there 
are Dickens and Thackeray. If ever spirits haunted 
the places they loved, these devoted chroniclers of 
town-life hover above and mingle amid the crowds 
it was once their delight to study and depict. You 
may be sure, sir, that insensibility to the active and 
stirring aspects of the town arises from dullness of 
imagination. All the brighter and more impressible 
spirits have almost invariably preferred the contact 
of men to the solitude of Nature ; and this prefer- 
ence will continue, you may be certain, so long as 
people delight in the refinements of society and the 
fruits of civilization. 

" Oh, yes ! I have heard before of the 



pleasures of the garden. Poets have sung, enthu- 
siasts have written, and old men have dreamed of 
them since History began her chronicles. But have 



102 BACHELOR BLUFF, 

the pains of the garden ever been dwelt upon ? 
Have people, now, been entirely honest in what 
they have said and written on this theme ? When 
enthusiasts have told us of their prize pears, their 
early peas of supernatural tenderness, their aspara- 
gus, and their roses, and their strawberries, have 
they not hidden a good deal about their worm- 
eaten plums — about their cherries that were carried 
off by armies of burglarious birds; about their po- 
tatoes that proved watery and unpalatable ; about 
their melons that fell victims to their neighbors' 
fowls ; about their peaches that succumbed to the 
unexpected raid of Jack Frost; about their grapes 
that fell under the blight of mildew ; about their 
green corn that withered in the hill ; about the 
mighty host of failures that, if all were told, would 
tower in high proportion above the few much- 
blazoned successes ? 

" Who is it that says a garden is a standing 
source of pleasure? Amend this, I say, by assert- 
ing that a garden is a standing source of discom- 
fort and vexation. There is always something in 
the garden to be done or planned, always some- 
thing to be reconstructed or readjusted. The car- 
penter is in perpetual demand with the man who 
has a garden. So is the mason. So is the florist. 
So is the laborer. So is the machinist. A man 



MR. BLUFF DISCOURSES OF THE COUNTRY. 103 

with a garden is ahvays trying to accomplish the 
impracticable. He is always planning how he can 
unite a maximum of sunshine with a maximum of 
shade ; how he can keep his trees, and yet open 
distant prospects; how he can enlarge his stables 
without abridging his grounds ; how he can shut 
out an ugly view in one direction and reveal a 
pretty one in another ; how he can expand his 
vegetable-beds, and yet keep them hidden behind 
his flower-parterres; how he can curve and lengthen 
a path in order to make his estate appear larger, 
or straighten it, so as to add to his convenience; 
how he can best keep his paths in order ; what 
should be done to improve the appearance of his 
lawn ; how he can save his shrubs that are threat- 
ened with decay; how he can rescue his fruit-trees 
from the insects; how he can keep off the mosqui- 
toes and prevent the ague ! His devices, and his 
designs, and his experiments, are legion. A hope- 
less restlessness, according to my observation, takes 
possession of every amateur gardener. Discontent 
abides in his soul. There is, indeed, so much to 
be done, changed, rearranged, watched, nursed, that 
the amateur gardener is really entitled to praise and 
generous congratulations when one of his thousand 
schemes comes to fruition. We ought in pity to 
rejoice with him over his big Lawton blackberries, 



104 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

and say nothing of the cherries, and the pears, and 
the peaches, that once were budding hopes, but 
have gone the way of Moore's 'dear gazelle.' Then 
the large expenditures which were needed to bring 
about his triumph of the Lawtons. * Those pota- 
toes,' said an enthusiastic amateur gardener to me 
once, * cost twenty-five cents apiece ! ' And they 
were very good potatoes, too — almost equal to those 
that could be bought in market at a dollar a bushel. 
" And then, amateur gardeners are feverishly ad- 
dicted to early rising. Men with gardens are like 
those hard drinkers whose susceptibilities are hope- 
lessly blunted. Who but a man diverted from the 
paths of honest feeling and natural enjoyment, pos- 
sessed of a demoniac mania, lost to the peace and 
serenity of the virtuous and the blessed, could find 
pleasure amid the damps, and dews, and chills, and 
raw-edgedness of a garden in the early morning, 
absolutely find pleasure in saturated trousers, in 
shoes swathed in moisture, in skies that are gray 
and gloomy, in flowers that are, as Mantalini would 
put it, ' demnition moist ' } The thing is incredi- 
ble ! Now, a garden, after the sun has dried the 
paths, warmed the air, absorbed the dew, is admis- 
sible. But a possession that compels an early turn- 
ing out into fogs and discomforts deserves for this 
fact alone the anathema of all rational beings. 



MJ^. BLUFF DISCOURSFS OF THE COUNTRY. 105 

''I really believe, sir, that the literature of the 
garden, so abundant everywhere, is written in the 
interest of suburban land-owners. The inviting one- 
sided picture so persistently held up is only a covert 
bit of advertising, intended to seduce away happy 
cockneys of the town — men supremely contented 
with their attics, their promenades in Fifth Avenue, 
their visits to Central Park, where all is arranged 
for them without their labor or concern, their even- 
ings at the music gardens, their soft morning slum- 
bers which know no dreadful chills and dews ! 
How could a back-ache over the pea-bed compen- 
sate for these felicities? How could sour cherries, 
or half-ripe strawberries, or wet rose-buds, even if 
they do come from one's own garden, reward him 
for the loss of the ease and the serene conscience 
of one who sings merrily in the streets, and cares 
not whether worms burrow, whether suns burn, 
whether birds steal, whether winds overturn, whether 
droughts destroy, whether floods drown, whether 
gardens flourish, or not ? 

" Yesterday I read an article in * Black- 



wood ' on ' Weather,* in which the writer, who seems 
to admire almost everything in Nature, makes an 
assault on fog. Yes, sir, fog. He denounces it as 
stagnant, sulky, and silent; as hopelessly objection- 



lo6 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

able, ugly, useless, stupid, and dirty. Now, sir, it is 
simply amazing how a writer, who delights ' in richly- 
endowed but widely wayward Nature,' should utter 
this wholly wrongful judgment upon one of ' the 
family of weather ' that to the observant eye has, 
not less than its kindred, its strange surprises, its 
picturesque aspects, its manifold beauties. Fog may 
be dirty in the cities when mixed with and stained 
by smoke, and at times it is undoubtedly stagnant, 
if not stupid; but one who has watched the move- 
ments of fog, who has seen the endless number of 
dissolving views it forms, who has noted the striking 
and picturesque ways in which artists use it, must 
resent the unhandsome epithets of our ' Blackwood ' 
writer. Have you ever passed a summer vacation 
on the seashore, and, stretching yourself upon a 
headland of the shore, watched the vagaries and 
fantastic sports of the soft, subtile, and undulating 
fog ; how it now comes rolling in from the sea with 
swift and steady course, first obscuring the horizon, 
then swallowing up sail after sail ; next seizing 
upon jutting points of land, sweeping along the sides 
of the cliffs, until suddenly it takes possession of 
and blots out the whole surface of sea and land .? 
Then presently you see a blue space overhead ; all 
at once a shadowy sail looms through the mist ; 
the fog lifts and shows a stretch of calm sea; then 



J/A\ BLUFF DISCOURSES OF THE COUNTRY. 107 

as suddenly again, as if some prompter regulated 
the rise and fall of this strange curtain, down falls 
the drapery of mist, and everything is hidden ! 
These shiftings and changes make striking pictures, 
believe me. At one moment a sail suddenly ap- 
pears, without a hull, dark, shadowy, and mystic in 
its body, but with its upper line catching the sun- 
light and glittering white like the wing of some 
huge bird of the sea ; in an instant more the fog 
has seized upon the sail, and enveloped it wholly, 
but the mantle is lifted beneath so as to reveal the 
dark form of the hull. If there are points of wooded 
headland jutting into the sea, you look and see 
them wholly obscured, but even while you look a 
long line of trees appears above a mass of drifting 
mist, looking like forests hung in the heavens. I 
once watched pictures like these, forming and dis- 
solving continually, and hence, I say, that he must 
be strangely ignorant of the mystic sprite called fog 
who heaps upon it such epithets as I have quoted. 
There is no better scenic artist on sea or land, sir, 
than the fog on a summer day when the winds un- 
steadily come and go. 

" The picturesque ! We talk a good deal 

about the picturesque, but how many of us under- 
stand what it is } No, sir ; we like to boast of our 



lo8 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

mountains, our cascades, our lakes, our forests, our 
rivers ; every summer the avenues of travel are 
crowded with throngs of pilgrims in search of what 
they call the picturesque; and yet, if there were any 
true natural sense of the picturesque, it would be 
sure to be exhibited in the houses we build. Look 
at the villas, mansions, cottages, what-not, that am- 
bition and wealth multiply all around us, and see 
how rarely we find anything picturesque, or even 
really pleasing to an artistic eye. The big villas 
and pinchbeck cottages that abound in our suburbs 
completely outrage every idea of the picturesque; 
in fact, we are never so hopelessly unpicturesque as 
when we are endeavoring to be picturesque. What 
people really like is prettiness. They want orna- 
mented towers, Mansard-roofs, fresh paint, white 
walls, showy gardens, and strange novelties of all 
kinds — caster-boxes, pagodas, gilt cages, Swiss toys, an 
interminable range of fantastic devices, whose names 
no man knoweth. No one seems to have an idea 
of building a house that will look as if it grew a 
part of the landscape, but must set it like a glitter- 
ing paste-jewel on a soiled finger, an abominable 
contrast with its surroundings. Then see how cold 
and uninhabitable most of the better kind of coun- 
try places seem in their spotless lawns, their shrub- 
bery trimmed to an extreme of cold propriety, their 



MR, BLUFF DISCOURSES OF THE COUNTRY. \ 



09 



dreary gravel-walks, their distant and reserved air, 
their whole atmosphere of restraint and human emp- 
tiness ! There is no life, no soul, no heartiness, no 
hospitality, no sense of comfort or felicity in those 
mausoleums, in which are buried human interests and 
passions. Many a humble cottage is a thousand 
times more inviting. I can not imagine myself 
living in them or dreaming in them; of finding in 
them life, or repose, or any form of human sweet- 
ness. When you build, sir, build with less preten- 
sion, with better sense of mellow contrasts and 
quiet tones; let nature be a little free, and art a 
little modest ; give to your country domicile the air 
of a rustic lass, coy and modest, and not the flash 
and cold disdain of a town belle. 

" I wonder many times whether Nature feels 



any delight in man ; whether it is insensible to the 
human affections offered to it. When the sea has 
all the winter months beat its dull, sad refrain 
upon the beach, does it not curl its white locks 
in graceful and joyous anticipation when it knows 
that youth and beauty are soon again to resume 
their places on the sands.? Does it not feel long- 
ing in its winter loneliness for the merriment of 
the summer sea - bathers .'* Can it not delight in 
the laughing girls and handsome boys that come 



no BACHELOR BLUFF. 

down to sport in its old arms? Have the woods 
no kindly sympathy with our pleasure in their si- 
lent shades ? Can not the mountains feel a glow- 
ing pride in our admiration for their stately maj- 
esty ? We can at least imagine the mountains 
and the woods and the sea waiting with earnest 
welcome for us, in the great largeness of their an- 
tique soul opening wide their bosom to the pulse of 
human feeling. This notion, you see, simply trans- 
fers to Nature something of the old Greek person- 
ality ; it makes Pan live again ; it restores the Dry- 
ads to the woods and the Naiads to the waters. 

" The beauty of every scene, my good sir, 



depends on the altitude of the sun and the angle 
of light. What is a mountain at high noon but a 
lumpish, dead, meaningless mass 1 But see the same 
mountain later in the day, with the sun behind it, 
and you have a magnificent picture. It stands in 
superb purple against a sky radiant with gold and 
yellow, like a crowned monarch at a pageant. But 
it does not need a mountain to make a picture ; 
sky and sunshine and air will do it for us any- 
where. There was a time, and that only recently, 
when artists went forth hunting for scenes to paint 
—-they searched for the weird, the terrible, the gro- 
tesque, the strange, the remote, the picturesque, the 



MR. BLUFF DISCOURSES OF THE COUNTRY, m 

imposing, the unfamiliar, and all the while left con- 
summate pictures at their very doors ! Our later 
painters have found this out ; they take a plain, a 
meadow with a stunted tree, a stretch of sand and 
sea, a clump of trees, any simple scene, and paint 
the light that falls upon it, the sky that overarches 
it, the atmosphere that fills it, and the picture stands 
a thing of beauty. Light and air, which are every- 
where, are everything. I remember once standing 
just at sunset on the northern shore of Long Island 
Sound. The sun was behind me, with all the east- 
ern sky glowing with the reflected light of the Avest- 
ern pageant, which was hid from me by a stretch 
of forest-trees. There was no wind, and the wide 
expanse of the Sound, as smooth, polished, and placid 
as a mirror, caught on its surface an exquisite pink 
tint from the sky above it. On this pink sea there 
were several becalmed vessels, whose sails stood 
yellow against the sky, with the hulls in shadow, 
like masses of dark bronze — all being perfectly re- 
flected in the glassy surface upon which they hung 
suspended. Well, sir, it was a picture that an artist 
like Gifford v/ould have delighted to paint, and yet 
it was but a momentary effect of light. One need 
not leave the town even to see these phantasmago- 
ria of the heavens. Who has ever painted the light 
of the setting sun on the house-tops, on gables, and 



112 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

chimneys, and dormer-windows ? I have seen it, 
sir, make our commonplace brick walls look like the 
domes and pinnacles of a celestial city. There are 
rare bits of scene-painting of this kind in town, if 
you only know how to look for them. 

" Pleasure, you say ! Pleasure-seeking, sir, 



commonly ends in more pain than delight. Our fe- 
licities are coy and wayward ; they come we know 
not whence, we can never be sure how, but often, 
when most desired or most vigorously sought for, 
they fail to respond, and quite as often, when least 
anticipated, they fill us with their glory. Pleasure 
can not be successfully prearranged. Too many con- 
ditions are necessary. One may sometimes secure 
everything but the disposition to enjoy, or he may 
find that the very fact of deliberately determining 
to be happy is of itself sufficient to destroy all pos- 
sibility of happiness. Then many forms of pleasure 
are a violent assault upon happiness. People seem to 
think that felicity is garrisoned in a citadel, and that 
due energy will be sure to conquer and secure the 
prize. Pleasure is in truth a jack-o'-lantern that we 
pursue only to see it escape us ; or it is a frail, deli- 
cate blossom, invisible in the gay parterre set out 
ostentatiously in its name, but appearing sometimes 
suddenly at our very feet in the ordinary highway 



MR. BLUFF DISCOURSES OF THE COUNTRY. 113 

where we looked for weeds only ; or, again, it is a 
little spirited cherub that avoids the glare of noisy 
shows, and all form of loud pretension, but in quiet 
hours slips into our heart and sets it beating with 
strange ecstasy. Premeditated pleasure, sir, is as im- 
possible as premeditated wit. One can not sit down 
and say, * I will make a jest ' ; he can not rise up 
and say, * I will go and find pleasure.' Every sum- 
mer we see all our towns, all our summer resorts, all 
our hotels, all our highways, full of violent seekers 
after pleasure. Men are hurrying for it to the sea- 
shore, pursuing it up the mountains, angling for it 
in the lakes, dancing for it at the watering-places, 
sailing for it on the rivers, rushing for it on the 
railways, fatiguing themselves almost to death for it 
everywhere — and yet rarely finding it. He is the 
happiest who knows how to extract pleasure from 
the thousand little things that lie in his daily path — 
from the sunshine and the rain, from the grass and 
the trees, from flowers and books, from old friends 
and new faces, from crowds and from solitude ; who 
knows how to note the shifting panorama of life that 
ceaselessly offers him change and contemplation, and 
does not imagine that pleasure must be sought with 
drum and trumpet and boisterous expectation. 

" Does any one ever sit down when the 



114 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

summer is over and compare his two expeditions to 
the country — yes, sir, his two expeditions — one the 
trip that he expected to take, and the other the 
trip that he really did take ? We all of us generally 
lay out in advance, on these occasions, a very hope- 
ful and attractive programme ; and we are apt to 
end with a performance in which a good many 
changes have to be made. For weeks beforehand 
we furbish up our fishing-rods; we clean the fowl- 
ing-piece ; we put ourselves in order in various 
ways for the long tramp, the sail, the ride, the pic- 
nic, the angling excursion ; and we say to ourselves 
that our pleasure shall not be abridged by the want 
of forethought or the need of preparation. And yet 
how differently matters turn out ! The picnic to 
the seashore would have been a great success had 
not the roads been so unendurably hot and dusty ; 
the tide, by a miscalculation of somebody, so low ; 
and threatening showers made an early rush home- 
ward so necessary. The long-planned yachting ex- 
cursion, in which fine winds, careening sails, ex- 
hilarating life in the swiftly-coursing yacht, were so 
eagerly prepictured, must of course fall on a day 
when a dead calm rendered motion almost impos- 
sible. The sails clung to the mast, the vessel drifted 
a little with the tide, and the long, dull hours were 
spent wistfully hoping for a breeze. And then how 



MR. BLUFF DISCOURSES OF THE COUNTRY. 115 

delightful the angling was going to be ! One saw 
himself wandering along picturesque little rivers, 
under arching trees, and by little, charming cas- 
cades. He fancied himself casting the fly into the 
silent, shaded pool, and saw the splendid dash with 
which some veteran of the brook darted at the skill- 
fully-dropped bait. He pictured the splendid and 
well-managed battle with the fish, and imagined it 
triumphantly landed. He saw himself, after a su- 
perb day's sport, wending homeward with his bas- 
ket, bending under the v/eight of his day's victo- 
ries. But always that tremendous difference between 
calculation and realization ! The picturesque little 
stream proved to be half dried up ; the cascades 
were only threads of water; the trees let in the hot 
and scorching sun; in the dark pools no trout rose 
to the fly ; and the journey homeward was with an 
empty basket, a hungry stomach, jaded limbs, and 
muttered maledictions on fly-fishing generally. One's 
other attempts at pleasure-making also exhibited a 
difference between anticipation and performance. 
The mountain scenery was not so fine and exhila- 
rating as was expected. The watering-places were 
either half attended and dull, or overcrowded and 
uncomfortable. All stay-at-homes, those who take 
only one trip to the country, and that the imagi- 
nary one, may console themselves that they have no 



Il6 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

disappointments of the kind to mourn over. There 
are always compensations, you see, if we have the 
wisdom to discover them. 

" How intolerably hot it is ! There is need, 



sir, of an entire change in our notions of summer. 
This season has, in all ages, and probably among all 
peoples, been the popular type of felicity. Not only 
has poetry in a thousand ways dwelt upon its charms 
and sung of its beauties, but proverbs have epito- 
mized its delights, and it has served to symbolize 
other forms of peace, happiness, and fruition. We 
count youth and beauty by summers; peevish and 
wrinkled old age by winters. Our discontents, our 
harsher passions, our evil fortunes, are often graph- 
ically paralleled by the rude aspects of December 
and January, while our contents and all our felici- 
ties are continually symbolized in the soft condi- 
tions of summer. Nov/, sir, this exaltation of the 
summer solstice has much more justification in tra- 
dition than in experience. When the world was 
young, no doubt, the summer season was justly en- 
titled to all the appreciation it enjoyed — all the 
bountiful praise and admiration now bestowed upon 
it by poets. Then, art did not know how to miti- 
gate the severities of winter, and civilization sup- 
plied no resources for enjoyment in the long, sun- 



MR. BLUFF DISCOURSES OF THE COUNTRY. 117 

less hours. Then, with summer came abundance, 
while winter was always associated with stint and 
deprivation. Fruits, that art could not preserve, 
were enjoyed only during the brief period in which 
they ripened. The harvest brought its plenty, but 
human ingenuity had not devised methods for ex- 
tending it throughout the year. Consequently, in 
primitive conditions the summer meant fruition and 
beneficence far more significantly than it does now. 
The abundance which we enjoy could not exist, it 
is true, if the summer suns did not do their work ; 
but the enjoyment of summer plenty is not now 
essentially identified with the season, as it was in 
early and rude periods of civilization. So there is 
implanted in our hereditary instincts, treasured up 
in our traditions, imbedded in our language, a vast 
deal of matter pertaining to summer which needs 
in these latter times to be revised. Civilization, 
which has deprived winter of all its terrors, and 
which has even converted some of its harshest feat- 
ures into means of enjoyment, has not succeeded at 
all with the discomforts of summer; so that, if we 
were governed less by tradition and more by actual 
experience, we would be disposed to look upon 
summer as a period necessary to be endured, in 
order that harvests may ripen, rather than as one 
within itself essentially felicitous. The heats of sum- 



ll8 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

mer suns prostrate us. The dust borne upon sum- 
mer airs suffocates us. The fevers bred by summ.er 
poisons sicken us. In fact, excessive heat causes an 
aggregate of suffering which cold can not parallel. 
The stirring winds of winter invigorate rather than 
destroy; or, if they prove too harsh and severe, our 
warm houses and our abundant clothing give us 
ample protection. Ordinarily the air of winter gives 
us strength and spirit, and the energy that succumbs 
entirely to the torrid suns of July will be aroused 
to a martial glow in a manly encounter with the 
December gale. I doubt even if the destitute suffer 
more in winter than in summer. Nothing seems so 
terrible as those streets of New York occupied by 
tenement-houses on hot summer days ; I have visited 
them in the different seasons, and the inmates really 
appear to suffer more in July from heat, want of 
fresh air, insects, and sickness, than in winter from 
cold and exposure. If people would be honest they 
would confess that they endure the summer rather 
than enjoy it. Those who remain in -our cities 
pant and stifle, and long for the return of winter; 
those who, in the name of pleasure, go in search of 
boasted summer delights, are scorched on mountain- 
tops, choked in dust-filled cars and stage-coaches, 
burned on exposed seacoasts, and assaulted every- 
where by mosquitoes and other insects. Art has 



MJ^. BLUFF DISCOURSES OF THE COUNTRY. 



119 



mitigated, sir, and civilization conquered, all other 
seasons but summer; and it is quite time that poe- 
try and the common sentimental utterance of the 
country were animated by facts as they are, and 
not by traditions founded on conditions of things 
long past. 



VIII. 



MR. BLUFF ON THE PRIVILEGES OF 
WOMEN. 

(On the Promenade.) 

Bachelor Bluff, 
A Lady. 

" The right of women to intellectual activity ! 

In the name of reason, madam, who has denied the 
right of women to intellectual activity .»* There are 
no laws and no restrictions, legal, moral, or social, 
that restrain women's intellectual activity. They 
may, at their pleasure — limited, of course, by their 
natural capacity — ^become philosophers, poets, novel- 
ists, historians, essayists, journalists, scientists, nat- 
uralists, inventors, painters, sculptors, musicians, sing- 
ers, composers, lecturers, actors ; they may become 
famous as thinkers, distinguished as conversationalists, 
and renowned for learning. Books are open to 
them. Nature is open to them ; in society they are 
absolute queens. They may acquire all the wisdom 



MR, BLUFF ON THE PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN. 121 

of the ancients and the moderns ; they may search 
out the mysteries of life and Nature ; they may give 
to social intercourse an intellectual elevation it has 
hitherto never known. 

" If they had the opportmiity ! Madam, this 



is the ceaseless cry, but women absolutely have more 
opportunity than men. Not so many of them have 
the advantage of college education, it is true, but 
the greatest achievements in philosophy, science, in- 
vention, art, and literature, have been made by men 
who never saw the inside of a college. Men of 
strong purpose create opportunity for themselves — 
create it while weaker minds are lamenting the ob- 
stacles that lie in their way. As for relative oppor- 
tunity between the sexes, nearly all men are con- 
demned either to business or the professions, and 
from an early age all their energies are thus bent 
in one enforced direction, while many women — not 
all, of course — have exceptional freedom in the 
choice of their studies and pursuits. All the preva- 
lent fuss and fret pertaining to this question comes, 
madam, from those women who are wholly without 
intellectual activity, but who are burned up with 
diseased vanity, and imagine that there are royal 
roads to distinction which the men enjoy and the 

other sex are debarred from. 
6 



122 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

" Women can not be lawyers, judges y or states- 
men ! No, madam, they can not yet. But no one 
who comprehends the subject would dream of call- 
ing exclusions of this character a limitation of in- 
tellectual activity. Law, medicine, and politics, which 
these restless women hunger for, are really the last 
pursuits that one with genuine 'intellectual activity' 
would think of following. The irksome and exact- 
ing duties of these professions keep the individual 
on a tread-mill ; they prevent study, they narrow the 
line of thought, they render almost impossible that 
altitude of pure intellectuality which the suppressed 
female genius of the land thirsts for. Business, as I 
have said, so generally imposed upon men in Amer- 
ica, to the great injury of their higher faculties, 
is not imposed upon women, and hence many of 
the * subjugated sex,' as they are called, have an 
immensely better opportunity for study and intellect- 
ual progress than men — such superior opportunity, 
indeed, that women, judging by this fact alone, 
ought to occupy the foremost place in all the higher 
intellectual fields of thought and effort. Literature, 
madam, has given us Jane Austen, Miss Edgeworth, 
Agnes Strickland, Mrs. Hemans, Charlotte Bronte, 
Mrs. Somerville, George Eliot, George Sand, Mrs. 
Oliphant, Jean Ingelow, Mrs. Stowe, and a host of 
other admirable female writers ; in art, there have 



MR. BLUFF ON THE PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN. 123 

been Angelica Kaufmann, Rosa Bonheur, and recent- 
ly a whole array of capable women-workers ; Sid- 
dons, O'Neil, Ellen Tree, Rachel, Ristori, Cushman, 
have adorned the dramatic art ; Malibran, Sontag, 
Jenny Lind, Alboni, Patti, Nilsson, and many others, 
have been a charm on the lyric stage ; in truth, the 
intellectual and art branches of human effort fairly 
glitter with the names of women whose 'intellectual 
activity ' quietly sought out the fields for which their 
genius fitted them, and in those fields speedily ac- 
quired ' name and fame.' It is, therefore, entirely 
obvious that women may be as intellectual as their 
capabilities will permit, without their mingling with 
the wrangles of the legislative chamber, usurping 
the places of the judges on the bench, or devoting 
themselves to the high art of the suffrage. But let 
me say that, while women are clamoring for greater 
liberty in their intellectual activities, men at the 
same time are bitterly complaining of the indifference 
of women to all subjects of political, scientific, or 
practical concern. If in our social intercourse we 
found women abounding with intellectual force, ex- 
hausting the opportunities at their command, over- 
flowing the bounds that restrict them with their 
surplus energy, we might well then be eager to make 
room for them in the courts, or at Washington, and 
elsewhere ; but, as society stands, it is obvious enough 



124 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

that women can find plenty of things at hand for 
the exercise of their ' intellectual activities ' without 
our remaking the laws of Nature or upheaving the 
foundations of society. 

" Would I give woman education ? Madam, 



true education was never given to any one ; people 
are never taught; they only learn. The education 
that a person possesses depends upon his capacity 
for taking possession of ideas and facts, his power 
of appropriation, his faculty for fusing crude ore 
and making it fine metal. Things that are taught 
pass through the mind as water runs through a bas- 
ket ; things that a man of his own force learns be- 
come part of himself. Do not imagine for a mo- 
ment that academies and colleges simply of them- 
selves make education possible ; it has been shrewd- 
ly said that a man can be a fool in seven languages. 
Education is possible only where there is an active, 
absorbing, analyzing, searching mind — and this mind 
always becomes learned wherever it is. Read the 
lives of those wonderful self-taught Scotch natural- 
ists and geologists, Edward and Dick, and never 
say a word more about woman's deficiency of op- 
portunity. 

" And let it not, madam, be perpetually assumed 
that education simply means the acquisition of learn- 



MR. BLUFF ON T/IF PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN. 125 

ing, or the mastery of a mass of facts. It is not so 
much mere culture that is required for women as 
character — that sort of training that gives to the 
mind largeness, health, repose, and solidity of under- 
standing. We have all met highly cultivated women 
who have been unstable of character and weak in 
judgment ; brilliant, but vain, frivolous, and irrational 
creatures ; and very unfortunate for the world would 
it be if women of this type were to be substituted 
for the women of the people, who, often unlearned in 
books, have yet in the great school of life acquired 
fortitude, strength, sobriety, and earnestness. The 
highest attribute of woman, after virtue and modesty, 
is character. If we could so educate our women 
that the nobler conditions of their nature would ex- 
pand — if they could acquire in schools profound 
sincerity of feeling, large judgment, intellectual dis- 
cernment and balance, we might well be indifferent 
to the exact extent of their purely literary acquisi- 
tions. There is, of course, no reason why learning 
and high culture should not only accompany these 
virtues, but really enforce and strengthen them ; un- 
less, indeed, they do so, their real value is open to 
dispute ; but do not all the facts around us show 
that a fairly superstitious reverence prevails as to 
the saving grace of mere knowledge — of familiarity 
with books and a taste for art .? Education seems to 



126 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

mean with many a mere cataloguing of facts. The 
man or woman who has studied at college or from 
a printed page is supposed to be entitled to higher 
credit than one who has acquired his facts at first 
hand — by the study of nature or the observation of 
men ; and one who has a smattering of all the arts 
is assumed to stand on a higher plane than another 
who has learned wisdom by the right use of judg- 
ment. First of all, madam, let education, physical 
and mental, make our girls large - natured women 
— women robust in physique and robust in mind, 
charged with high sentiment, capable of giving to 
the world men formed after their own noble mold ; 
and then the refinements of culture would come as 
graceful embroidery to the substantial fiber. 

'* Are not men and wojnen eqical ? The sum of 



two different things may be equal, but unlike things, 
madam, are never alike, despite all the female phi- 
losophers in the universe ; and the unlikeness be- 
tween men and women established by Nature can 
never be abolished by conventions, platforms, or stat- 
utes. Every race, every nation, every period, every 
community, every class, every profession, has its dis- 
tinctive characteristics, and hence it is tolerably cer- 
tain that each sex has its specific qualities. Now, 
one quality of the masculine intellect is the power 



MR. BLUFF ON THE PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN. 127 

of abstraction. It has the faculty of deaUng with 
things upon the pure basis of abstract fact. But the 
female intellect deals with things in relation to per- 
sons only. Its approach to analysis is always through 
its sympathies ; and this peculiarity of woman's con- 
stitution is indisputably radical, inasmuch as it 
springs from her instincts of maternity. To say that 
a nature charged through and through with the great 
divinity of motherhood has mental likeness to a sex 
unmoved by this great power, is to abolish all condi- 
tions of distinction, and to form conclusions regard- 
less of testimony to the contrary. The whole range 
of woman's nature, madam, is toned and colored by 
this one supreme fact of her composition. It limits 
her range of speculation by concentrating her power 
of affection ; it withdraws her sympathies from what 
is remote to what is personal and near ; it establishes 
a relation with things of the world almost exclusive- 
ly through her affections. What she is not inspired 
to love, she has no inspiration to heed. Within her 
pulse beats the pulse of mankind. All the facts 
and speculations in the world become subordinated 
to the powerful longings and sympathies this great 
link with the race establishes. Hence the essential 
necessity for mental activity in woman is, that her 
development should be through her affinities. She 
can not be abstract ; she must be personal. In lit- 



128 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

tie things and big things this is apparent. Woman 
has a passion for novel-reading, because her sympa- 
thies are so keen ; and she makes the best of novel- 
writers, because she feels so quickly the pulse of 
passion. The very gossip that a woman delights in 
is one consequence of her absorption of the per- 
sonality of people. She is nothing, except in con- 
tact with her kind. She likes society better than 
men do, and solitude less. She lives almost solely 
in her relations to the human family. All this being 
true, it is evident that her mental culture should 
have its own distinct aims. It is not necessary for 
any practical end that it should be the same as 
men's, and it can only produce good fruit by being 
consonant to the law of her nature. If a woman 
knew no Greek nor Latin, no mathematics nor phi- 
losophy, but surrendered her imagination to the 
great masters of literature ; if poetry, music, and 
art, filled her soul with their mellowing touches ; if 
the forests and fields revealed their secrets of beau- 
ty to her ; if her mind became thus enriched with 
the most sympathetic facts in literature and nature, 
we should discover in her some of the happiest and 
most edifying aspects of culture. As men's muscles 
do the severer manual labor, let their brains perform 
the severer mental labor. In women there should be 
that development which gives the largest grace of 



MK. BLUFF ON THE PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN. 129 

womanhood, and the supremest culture in the arts 
that humanize and adorn. 

" Your lives are vapid and purposeless ! Are they 
to be rendered purposeful in any right sense by 
plunging into the discords of life ? Need they be 
vapid and purposeless, with all the sciences and all 
literature and all nature before you ? Make an ob- 
ject in life, by all means, and do not imagine that 
this is only possible by having the unattainable 
brought to your door, or by a fiat that translates 
you into men ; for we, too, are full of similar dis- 
contents, we, too, are too often ignorant of the art 
of living — an art, madam, that consists in the knowl- 
edge of how to be interested in the things that lie 
in our daily paths — in the art of seizing and appro- 
priating things, of putting our heart and intellect 
into relation with the facts of life and the phenom- 
ena of nature, and this is better than ambition, or 
the hurly-burly of life. Ambition is an appetite 
that grows upon what it feeds. Discontent more 
often eats into the heart of the successful man than 
into that of the humble one. Women who escape 
from the dominion of the hearth-stone into the broad 
field of struggle and triumph are not going there- 
by to conquer or silence their spirit of unrest — 
that 



130 



BACHELOR BLUFF, 

' . . . fever at the core, 
Fatal to him who bears, to all who ever bore.' 



Those who fret to-day over their vapid and pur- 
poseless lives may come in some future day to fret 
over their successes, longing for new worlds to con- 
quer. Discontent was never yet, since the world 
began, allayed by the acquisitions of ambition. Your 
remedy lies solely in intellectual occupation and pur- 
suits, which are as free to you, as I have already 
said, as to men. 

" And let me say that the best gifts in the 
world are those of seeing and hearing. A great 
many people have eyes, but very few have eye- 
sight. A great many have senses and faculties, but 
very few know how to fully employ them. Man or 
woman endowed with the usual gifts of sight, and 
observation, and mental force, must have discovered 
some effective way of paralyzing and suppressing 
them, if he or she travels down the years a purpose- 
less life. There are hundreds of things around the 
most humble and circumscribed life that are capa- 
ble of giving it purpose, and supplying it with zest. 
The book of Nature is open to woman, with her 
fine susceptibilities more completely so than to men ; 
and here are exhaustless things of interest. Every 
woman may become so much of an artist, at least, 



MR. BLUFF ON THE PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN. 131 

as to learn to enjoy form and color — enough of an 
artist to open her eyes and note the endless charms 
which a devoted and intelligent spirit can see in 
the woods, the rocks, the sea, and the skies. Every 
woman may become enough of a botanist, entirely 
by her own exertions, to find a hundred significant 
facts and delights in the plants that she now treads 
recklessly under her feet. Every woman may be 
enough of a geologist or a naturalist to learn from 
the stones pleasing lessons, and to find in animal 
life endless facts of the profoundest interest. Now 
and then a woman may make a discovery in one 
of these pursuits, and so win fame ; but not for 
fame, not for what the world may say, not for the 
gratification of vanity, but purely for the sake of 
themselves, must these studies be pursued if they 
are to effectually silence the spirit of unrest. 

" Me7t would make of women household 

drudges I Madam, what fair and right-minded men 
ask of women is that they should fill a place which 
has certain definite boundaries, but one not less in 
character than that enjoyed by the other sex, al- 
though differing from it. It would be a great thing 
for the happiness of mankind, madam, if women 
could form adequately that necessary complement 
to the other sex by which its deficient conditions 



132 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

would be supplied — giving to the intercourse of two 
opposites the fullness of one complete existence ; 
contrasting against the struggle and warfare of man 
the repose and meditative calm of woman, against 
the harsh and rugged aspects of competitive em- 
ployment the ripe culture and sesthetic taste of an 
imagination permitted to expand in an atmosphere 
housed in from care and struggle. One may some- 
times indulge in ideal pictures of life ; and my ideal 
of men and women in their associated lives depicts 
the v/oman full of large and serene sympathy, capa- 
ble of thinking upon all subjects of human concern, 
but as specially kindling in the members of the 
household an appreciation of the beautiful in all its 
many forms of art, music, poetry, and conduct. Why, 
when so many different things are to be done in 
the world, is it that women insist upon doing those 
things that the masculine sex can do so much bet- 
ter, and avoiding those more admirable things which 
women only can do well .-* If our strong-minded 
pleaders could fully understand how complete and 
perfect their happiness might be on the aesthetic 
and imaginative side of life, they would scarcely 
seek to mingle in the harsh competitions of the 
world, which they can not touch without losing 
those characteristics which all ages and all peoples 
have united in desiring for women — without substi- 



MR. BLUFF ON THF PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN. 133 

tuting acuteness for meditation, sharpness for soft- 
ness, contention for calm, noise and bustle for taste 
and sympathy, warfare for peace. A world in which 
all the women simply copied and echoed all the 
men, in which a man found in the wife of his 
bosom a rival in his profession, where the contest 
and struggle of life were repeated at the hearth- 
stone, would prove a dreadful weariness to the body 
and the spirit. The millennium, madam, does not 
lie in that direction. In the name of all that is 
desirable, I beg certain declaimers to try and un- 
derstand a few elementary principles — to realize that 
everything under heaven is a law to itself, and that 
nothing whatsoever can successfully fill the place or 
live the life of any other distinct thing. The felici- 
ty of human association depends upon the accept- 
ance of just this principle — of perceiving the relation 
of parts, the division of duties and privileges, and 
upon recognizing that the perfection of the whole is 
attainable only by the due subordination of the sev- 
eral parts. The world will get along much better 
with first-rate men-men, and first-rate women-women, 
than by confounding the qualities of the two, and 
giving us very inferior masculine women and worth- 
less feminine men. 

" There is no danger that women ivill be unsexed 



134 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



by enlarging their sphere of activity! This depends, 
madam, upon the nature of the enlargement of 
this sphere. It certainly will not unsex women to 
enlarge their activity in study ; they may know a 
great deal more than they do now about history, 
and philosophy, and science, and literature, and art, 
without any loss to their womanliness; but if 'en- 
larging their sphere of activity' means making poli- 
ticians of them, sending them to Congress, making 
lawyers and judges of them, then I beg to say that 
under this experience they would most decidedly 
become unsexed. Can the qualities of any thing — 
of any human, any animal, or any plant even — re- 
main unchanged with all its environments altered? 
It is impossible in nature that new conditions should 
not cause a fresh adaptation and adjustment. If 
men and women are to receive the same education, 
attempt the same professions, experience the same 
contentions, undergo the same struggles, be trained 
in the same facts, and crammed with the same ideas 
— to be in all their contact with the world the same 
entities, as it were — it is simply impossible that all 
the distinction of feeling, and taste, and principle, 
that now exists, should remain unchanged. A man 
may not care whether such a change occurs or not, 
but if he does care, if he thinks that a man-woman 
is not an estimable or an agreeable thing for the 



MR, BLUFF ON THE PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN. 135 

contemplation of gods or men, then let him have 
the wit to see that the womanliness of woman can 
only be preserved by her isolation from the ruder 
phases of life, by that feminine culture and training 
under which her tastes and her faculties are rightly 
developed. Let us have robust, stalwart, hard- 
headed men, and let us have lovable and delightful 
women; let all the qualities that make great mascu- 
line natures be assiduously cultivated, and all the 
qualities that make gentle women be also assidu- 
ously cultivated, but with no confusion whatever as 
to their characteristics, duties, and tasks. Those 
people who like the sexes mixed can do something 
toward accomplishing their purpose, but they will 
have to encounter two formidable obstacles — nature 
being one, and the honest instincts of the great 
multitude of men and women being the other. 

" Men are afraid of learned aftd brilliant 



women I Madam, the men thus charged with men- 
tal pusillanimity in regard to intellectual women are 
not commonly supposed to exhibit a similar dread 
of learned and accomplished persons of their own 
sex. No man withholds from a club because great 
men belong to it. No man is afraid of a career at 
the bar, in literature, or in politics, because distin- 
guished persons are connected with those profes- 



136 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



sions, whom it will probably be his destiny to meet 
and perhaps professionally to encounter. Men, if 
anything, are over-confident in all intellectual strug- 
gles with their fellows ; self-respect, or pride, or con- 
ceit — some motive either worthy or unworthy — pre- 
vents them from acknowledging inferiority, even if 
they are conscious of it. It can not, therefore, be 
that men dislike learned women because they are 
apprehensive of intellectual fence. People are usu- 
ally too unconscious of defeat in all encounters of 
wit to dread it much. Their very insensibility to 
the palpable hits and the verbal triumphs of an op- 
ponent give them no fear of the conversational 
arena. The dullness or the indifference of men in 
this particular is alone, madam, sufficient to prevent 
them from disliking ability in women; and then 
every man is so profoundly assured of the intellect- 
ual inferiority of your sex that, in the abundance 
of his confidence, he has no doubt. Clever men 
know that the most brilliant women are always vul- 
nerable in argument, and stupid men talk on with- 
out ever knowing they are defeated. 

" Why\ then, is conspicuous ability disliked in wom- 
en ? Are you not assuming your ground } Is it 
certain that men are offended at the evidence of 
talent in your sex.? Yet in a certain form it must 



MR. BLUFF ON THE PRIVILEGES OF WOMEN, 137 

be conceded they are. Every man imagines women 
of genius in whom he could find delight; but, what- 
ever learned women may say or think about the 
matter, the first, the second, and the third essential 
quality that every man admires in his mother or 
seeks for in a wife is v/omanliness. If genius and 
learning can enhance this supreme grace, genius and 
learning will be admired in women ; but, so long as 
it is believed that intellectual force extinguishes or 
diminishes delicacy, gentleness, and sweetness, men 
will dread its manifestation in their wives and daugh- 
ters. Frivolity and insipidity, which men are ac- 
cused of liking in women, are simply accepted with 
forbearance when they are accompanied by those 
charms of sex that make women delightful, and 
which compensate for so many shortcomings. Judg- 
ment, taste, discretion, vivacity — all good qualities 
of sound minds, are excellent things ; but even these 
in women must be fused into a harmonious, mellow, 
unobtrusive unity. Delicacy of apprehension, quick- 
ness of perception, capacity of appreciation — these 
supreme womanly qualities of mind every man of 
taste, I assure you, delights in ; but loud argument, 
boisterous assertion, clamorous talk, these things men 
do most decidedly dread in women, and these things 
have too commonly marked our intellectual Amazons. 
Do not, madam, let women lay the flattering unc- 



138 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

tion to their souls that men fear their mental su- 
periority; let them rather believe that there is gal- 
lantry enough among us yet even to delight in their 
victories over ourselves ; but let them understand 
that, so long as man inherits the nature of Adam, 
the primal delight of his heart will be in fresh, 
fair, and gentle women, and every honest man will 
confess that he does fear in woman whatever may 
tend to rob her of these graces. Perhaps you think 
all this very commonplace. Well, so I fear it is — 
it is so true and common that it has been known 
since the world began." 



IX. 

MR. BLUFF ON MODERN FICTION. 

(/« the Library.') 

Bachelor Bluff, 
A Critic. 

Bluff. There is no greater blunder, sir, than to 
assume that stories which depict the throes of heated 
passion or the perturbations of well-bred lovers in 
a drawing-room are of a higher intellectual rank 
than narratives of adventure and exploit. 

Critic. How can you say this.^ Assuredly anal- 
ysis of character is the highest and most subtile 
phase of the novelist's art. 

Bluff. High and subtile, I grant, but it has not 
the whole field. There are not only other worthy 
things than the study of emotions and motives, but 
psychological probing, when pushed too far, is apt 
to become a great bore, and not unfrequently stim- 
ulates an unhealthful and morbid passion for intro- 
spection. It is not a good thing, sir, to be always 



140 



BACHELOR BLUFF, 



looking into our own minds or into the minds of 
our neighbors. The subjective novel within due 
limits is proper enough to read and study, but when 
made too large a part of our intellectual food the 
result is morally and mentally hurtful. The breezy, 
out-of-door, objective novel affords an excellent coun- 
ter-current of sensation, and for this reason alone 
it ought to be sandwiched between the highly sea- 
soned preparations of the subjective school. 

Critic. But peculiarities of mind, tendencies of 
feeling, and operation of motive are necessary to 
give vitality to character. Without them the people 
of a story would not seem to be genuine, and con- 
sequently would fail to awaken the reader's sympa- 
thies. It requires the highest order of skill to depict 
character truthfully and logically ; to look into the 
minds of men and see their workings, to trace the 
operations of cause and effect, and to measure accu- 
rately and depict authentically the reflex actions of 
temperament and emotion. 

Bluff. No doubt ; and it requires the highest 
order of skill to be a great surgeon, but what have 
1 you and I to do with anatomy ? What business 
have healthful minds to be probing among the dis- 
eases of the body or the mind 1 It is not disease 
but health that should attract healthful men, and 
those' works of art that depict the bright, the felici- 



MR. BLUFF ON MODERN FICTION. 



141 



tons, the open, the robust, are the most useful to 
mankind, whether the skill required for them be 
more or less. The reasons that make us like epic 
poems, that lead us to admire the temples and stat- 
ues of the ancients, that give to form and color so 
much fascination, are the elementary foundations of ^^ 
the objective novel. If it is a fine thing to be sen- 
sitive to the beauties of nature, it must be a fine 
thing to be sensitive to pictures of life that are 
closely related to those open aspects of the world 
around us; and, if architecture stands high in the 
aesthetic world, if color in painting is entitled to 
our admiration, if the lines of sculpture are worthy 
of our study, then romances which deal preeminently 
with color and form are candidates for an equal 
appreciation. The novel of action is an epic in , 
prose; the novel of picturesque situation is like a 
stirring painting on canvas ; and the novel that 
gives us heroes and heroines of ideal grace and 
beauty awakens in us some of the same sensations ' 
that higher sculpture does. The arts generally deal 
with the objective, appealing exclusively to the 
senses ; and it is therefore certainly not a feeble 
or unworthy thing for the novelist to appeal to the 
same sensibilities that painters and sculptors do. It 
is only by realizing the really high place in art 
that novels of description and action may occupy 



1^2 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

when the performance is equal to the plan, that one 
is prepared to form a just estimate of romances 
like Scott's and Cooper's. 

Critic. But, assuredly, you place these novels 
much below George Eliot's ? 

Bluff. Do I place Greek literature below your 
modern would-be psychological romance ? Do I 
place the greatest of your psychological heroines be- 
low Shakespeare's Rosalind or Portia ? Is the Apol- 
lo Belvedere a lesser work of art than George Eliot's 
Gwendolen ? I must not compare things so dif- 
ferent, you say, but comparisons of distinctly differ- 
ent things sometimes bring us up sharply and ena- 
ble us to see where we are. The art and literature 
of the past which the world could least afford to 
lose are almost wholly objective — works that deal 
with the external, with beauty, action, courage, and 
force. Shall I tell you v/hat I consider the most 
perfect figure in our American literature } It is 
young Uncas, in Cooper's '' Last of the Mohicans." 
He incarnates the three special qualities of the hero 
— youth, grace, and daring ; and neither Hector, nor 
Paris, nor Perseus has greater fascinations than that 
strange and almost mystic figure would have pos- 
sessed had he also come down to us from the re- 
mote past. As a product of Greek imagination he 
would have embodied the melancholy, the beauty, 



yJ/A'. BLUFF OJV MODERN FICTION. 



143 



and the spirit of the woods, just as the German 
sprite Undine does of the waters. He would have 
figured in endless statues and paintings, and have 
fired the fancy of innumerable poets. But, born 
close to us, being our very own, we have lacked the 
faculty of seeing in him the exquisite poetical con- 
ditions that three thousand years ago would have 
made him immortal. We think we appreciate the 
heroes of Greek story because we have been indus- 
triously instructed how to admire them, but we have 
shown an utter lack of ability to seize for ourselves 
upon a singularly beautiful figure of our own land 
and time, which as a type of a splendid young sav- 
age is unique and artistically perfect. He is filled 
with the very breath of poetry, and yet neither our 
painters, our poets, nor our sculptors have dis- 
covered him. It may some day be thought that this 
Adonis of the woods is as worthy of attention as 
diseased studies in spiritual anatomy, and v/e may 
be sure that our tastes will not be healthful, robust, 
strong, or sweet until this time comes about. 

Critic. I am really astonished at your selection 
of this figure as your ideal of a creation in art. I 
should certainly have expected rather a selection 
from Hawthorne, if an American author must be 
preferred. 

Bluff. Oh ! I read Hawthorne with immense in- 



144 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

terest, but can you believe that his creations, fasci- 
nating as they are, can possibly influence the mind 
as wholesomely as Cooper's young savage ? Health 
is always out-of-doors ; in the air, and the breeze, 
with open, transparent life. All the world is con- 
tinually talking about the philosophic Hamlet, and 
measuring Shakespeare's power by this character and 
his Macbeth and Othello ; but, sir, to my mind that 
in which Shakespeare conspicuously asserts his su- 
periority, in which he transcends everything else in 
imaginative literature, is his female characters — his 
Rosalind, Portia, Imogen, Viola, Miranda, Beatrice, 
Juliet, Isabella, Desdemona, Ophelia. Here we have 
a superb and wonderful sisterhood unmatched any- 
where, and fairly unmatchable. By these women 
Shakespeare separates himself distinctly from every 
other dramatist and novelist ; nowhere else are wit, 
vivacity, beauty, purity of feeling, womanliness, ele- 
vation of character, and a superb poetic gayety, so 
admirably and exquisitely blended as in Rosalind, 
Portia, and Viola. If you should place on one side 
all the other creatures of the imagination in Eng- 
lish literature and on the other side the women of 
Shakespeare, and force me to choose between them, 
I would take Rosalind and her sisterhood, and let 
the rest go. There is no spiritual anatomy nor 
psychological dissection in a line that Shakespeare 



MR. BLUFF ON MODERN FICTION. 



H5 



wrote about them. They are glorious by the stand- 
ard of the most perfect art — because they penetrate 
with delight, because they elevate the imagination, 
because they charm the fancy, because they excite 
the profoundest and purest pleasure. 

Critic. Tell me what you consider the purpose 
of fiction. 

Bluff. The current notion appears to be that the 
end of fiction is to depict the mishaps and defeats 
of life with realistic fidelity. The heroes and hero- \ 
ines of the earlier novel underwent innumerable 
tribulations, but always in the end overcame adverse 
circumstances as well as enemies, and sat down in 
peace with their hearts' desires accomplished. This 
regulation deiioilfnenf is now unfashionable, and story- 
writers absolutely take excessive pains to make their 
characters permanently unhappy. A marriage in the 
last chapter is looked upon as a weak concession to 
a conventional and inartistic prejudice, and heroes 
and heroines are consequently made for the express 
purpose of exemplifying defeat, and shov/ing how the 
best-laid plans may come to grief. It seems to be 
the accepted method to select characters with marked 
flaws in them, in order to indicate how " the rift " 
will " by-and-by make the music mute." This wan- 
ton design to make sadness the fashion clearly arises ' 
from the notion that art should consist of devices 



146 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

for showing all the unhandsome features of life, all 
the disagreeable and calamitous possibilities that be- 
set mankind ; and he is thought to be a master-hand 
who is most expert in multiplying mischances, and 
who exhibits the greatest ingenuity in bringing right 
things to wrong ends. Now, sir, the real reason for 
the novel, the why and wherefore that men and 
women delight in the fictitious fortunes of other men 
and women, is because something is given which 
supplements nature, which bestows that which life 
too often denies. Every man has at heart a pas- 
sionate love for what I will call the symmetries of 
fate — for the rewards that follow earnest and honest 
endeavor, and the justice that gives us finally full 
compensation for all that we endure. Through all 
the calamities and mishaps that surround us, we all 
of us dream of possibilities — of the good that will 
come by-and-by to cheer us ; of difficulties assailed 
and overcome, of enemies put down, of the felicitous 
completion of our schemes. And it is exactly be- 
cause these dreams so rarely come true in real life, 
that people delight in those inventions called novels, 
wherein wrong and suffering are or ought to be suit- 
ably rectified. When mischance pursues us, there is 
a delightful compensation in following the career of 
a hero who overcomes misfortunes, and wrests things 
to his own ends. In real life, bitterness and jeal- 



MR. BLUFF ON MODERN FICTION. 



H7 



ousy may be felt at the better fortunes of other 
men ; but in the novel the hero is our very self, and 
all his achievements and successes are enjoyed with 
almost as much zest as if they were our very own. 
The very foundation of fiction, sir, its significance 
and meaning to most people, lie in this power to 
reflect each reader in one of the principal person- 
ages. It shows us what we would like to do, and 
what we know we feel. The young lady who reads 
many novels has many lovers, and is married many 
times. Your psychological novel is valuable for this 
reason solely, because it analyzes successfully our 
own moods and emotions. The extent to which one 
delights in the novel always depends upon the facil- 
ity with which he can transfer himself in imagina- 
tion to the pages he is reading. If fiction did not 
succeed in getting us out of ourselves, in creating 
worlds more delightful than the world we experi- 
ence, in fashioning things better to our liking than 
Fate fashions them, it is certain that novels would 
go generally unread. The true function of the novel 
is here apparent. It must give us pictures of life 
with a great core of sweetness, enlarging our indi- 
viduality by multiplying our experiences and delights 
— the artistic requirements being simply that the 
people and incidents shall be possible and wholly 
thinkable. The writers who imagine they can se- 



1^8 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

cure sympathy by endowing their characters with 
unheard-of virtues, or showering upon them impos- 
sible good fortunes, defeat their ends ; but writers 
who, in disgust at these excesses, turn around and 
portray characters without charm, and substitute 
calamities for blessings, drift altogether away, not 
only from popular sympathy, but from the real pur- 
pose of the novel. Distinctly, nobody wants novels 
that reproduce all the sufferings and struggles of 
real life unless supplemented with those compensa- 
tions that in real life ought to follow, but rarely do ; 
for the novel is nothing more than a device for set- 
ting the disorders of life right, and making us all 
happy by the contemplation of final — and so often 
rightly called poetic — ^justice. The novel that does 
not do this thing may entertain a good many people 
by its character-sketches and its descriptions, but, in 
missing the fundamental purpose of fiction, must fail 
to command the sympathies of the great world of 
readers. 

Critic. The rude and stirring novels of Mesdames 
Holmes and Southworth, that have such a hold in 
certain rural sections, must, according to your rule, 
be the very best of novels — for they accomplish 
effectually for their readers all that you set down 
as the true purpose of fiction. 

Bluff. Would they have their multitude of read- 



MK. BLUFF ON MODERN FICTION. i^g 

ers if they did not do this very thing? I dare say 
they have endless faults, but they would find no 
readers if they did not bring home to people some 
sweetness and pleasure. The only difference be- 
tween these novels and better ones is, that the lat- 
ter attempt to accomplish the same end with truer 
pictures of life and a higher literary quality — and 
often lose the end, let me say, by doing so. 

Cnyic. A French critic declares that the quality 
conspicuously deficient in American fiction is ^as^e. 
Unfortunately, this defect is strikingly characteristic' 
in the works of the more popular of our writers. 
The American story-tellers who cultivate taste, who 
exhibit fastidiousness and artistic finish, are com- 
monly without large constituencies of readers. And 
yet, singularly enough, English novelists of the first 
class are very widely read in America. 

£luff. Then it is evident that native authors of 
superior culture are not neglected because they aim 
too high. A public that devours tens of thousands 
of a novel by George Eliot, or William Black, or 
Thomas Hardy, shows its capacity to rise to the 
level of the most fastidious of our own writers of 
fiction. The difficulty is, that our own authors imagine 
that fastidiousness means the exclusion of sympathy^ 
and passion. Literary folk and certain people who 
always take a place by the side of literary leaders 



150 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



whether they understand or not, have great admira- 
tion for two or three Boston story-writers, and meas- 
ure other people's cuUure by their estimate of those 
writers' books. They are very good books indeed, 
very noticeable for keen insight into character and for 
refined subtilty, but refinement and subtilty are never 
enough of themselves to command a wide suffrage. 
The mountain-stream is clear, sparkling, and full of 
beauty, but it is the broad, deep sea that encom- 
passes. Of pleasant and sparkling literary rivulets 
we have enough ; we all long for the majesty and 
power of the deep — for books that shall have finish 
and taste without losing the pulse of humanity, that 
shall stir our passions and our sympathies pro- 
foundly without transcending the bounds of nature 
or the laws of art. Our better writers seem to be 
frightened at the turbulence of actual life and the 
passions of earnest men and women; they play on 
the verge of the great expanses of life, dallying with 
trifles, analyzing queer specimens, asking us to ad- 
mire them because they have dissected a blade of 
grass, and lamenting because the world casts but 
a half-glance at their pretty toys. It is simply im- 
possible that these writers should find acceptance 
with the general public. There are English novel- 
ists that have all their refinement with a large meas- 
ure of real power, with strong sympathies, with deeper 



MR. BLUFF ON MODERN FICTION. i^i 

currents of feeling, and these writers must inevitably 
be preferred to our own writers so long as the lat- 
ter prefer intellectual legerdemain to earnest pur- 
pose, and are content to address their tasteful noth- 
ings to each other and their little parlor circles 
rather than write for the great world at large. 

Critic. In asserting that the purpose of fiction is 
to adjust what you call the " symmetry of fate," 
you overlook the significant fact that those works 
of imagination which have a tragical termination 
have always had a deeper and more lasting hold 
upon the world than any other. And the same 
thing exists in historic passages. Who would care 
for the story of Hero and Leander had those young 
people's love-adventure ended in marriage .? It is 
the sad fate of Juliet and Francesca that makes their 
stories so well remembered. Beatrice Cenci would 
have long since been forgotten had her career ended 
happily. It is the dismal fate of Mary Queen of 
Scots that makes her story the most read of any 
queen in history. When Dickens brought Little Nell 
to an early grave, he took the surest method of im- 
mortalizing her. 

Bluff. People always remember pains longer than 
pleasure. A shock of any kind is never forgotten, 
but this scarcely proves that the shock was agree- 
able, or that it is right to inflict gratuitous suffering. 



152 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

Then, again, the immortality which ill-fated heroes and 
heroines experience is partly due to the perpetual 
protest against the deep damnation of their taking-off. 

Clitic. I think it is due to the fact that sym- 
pathy and grief are more profound than pleasure. 

Bluff. I wonder who would care for the fates 
of imaginative heroes and heroines if they were not 
lovers ? Love is the passion, my good sir, that makes 
the whole world kin. Youth and beauty and love 
prematurely perishing — the thought is so exquisitely 
painful, so penetrating and intense, that the whole 
nature rises up in rebellion against the idea. For 
this reason catastrophes of this kind are only per- 
missible in high-wrought poems, dealing with well- 
known tragedies. No man should invent a tragedy, 
and especially a tragedy of life of to-day. There 
has been and is too much suffering in the world to 
make such a thing endurable. The novel, moreover, 
is a picture of life, of character, of manners ; it is 
a comedy ; it is an insight into modes of feeling and 
action ; it is a revelation of familiar phases of exist- 
ence; and tragedy is too lofty and intense for the 
canvas. Let one take the story of Hero and Lean- 
der, or of Francesca, or of Juliet, and weave it into 
a poem, if he will, thereby simply emphasizing a sad 
story already known, but to my mind tragedy needs 
historic perspective, the mist of distance, the sense 



MR. BLUFF ON MODERN FICTION. 153 

that it is irretrievable, to commend it to my sym- 
pathies. 

Critic. Sympathy seems to me the one universal 
gift of mankind ; it is not limited to class or period. 

Bluff. Oh, everybody knows how to weep, but it 
takes a fine texture of mind to know thoroughly 
how to enjoy the bright and happy things of life. 

Critic. The easiest thing in the world is to move 
people to laughter. 

Bluff. By buffoonery, yes. Antics will always set 
an audience in the theatre in a roar, when lightness, 
brilliancy, wit, the flash and sparkle of genuine gay- 
ety, are scarcely felt at all. Gayety, let me tell you, 
is the rarest thing in literature ; and it is the most 
difficult thing an actor is called upon to express — 
so difficult, indeed, that v/e now rarely find it on the 
stage at all. A rude throng blubbers at sentiment 
and roars at buffoonery ; it is only the best minds 
that delight in intellectual grace, in fine thoughts 
finely expressed, in the happy phrase, in the winning 
word, in the Saladin blade of comedy. 

Critic. Does not a delight in mere brilliancy, in 
gay lightness, indicate a moral deficiency 1 People 
whose moral sense is acute can not fail to take a 
serious view of life, perhaps even a sad one, and to 
those minds vivacity always appears thoughtless and 
heartless. 



1^4 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

Bluff. Vivacity is not a product of psychological 
study, no doubt. It is another form of objective 
art ; it is a part of the splendor of the external ; it 
is a form of paganism. Have you ever thought, by- 
the-way, of the extent to which paganism characterizes 
our fiction. The utter exclusion of every form of 
religious belief or sentiment from many novels wide- 
ly read by the best classes is very surprising and per- 
haps significant. These novels are not irreligious ; 
they are simply non-religious. They are not hostile 
to religion in any of its forms ; they do not deny 
the validity of faith, nor oppose, either directly or 
by implication, any of the creeds or any current 
dogma ; they simply are as silent in regard to relig- 
ion as if there were no such thing in the world. 
They are not more completely insensible to condi- 
tions of mind and thought that may be supposed to 
exist in Jupiter or Venus than they are dumb to 
the profoundest and the most prevailing phases of 
feeling that exist. I have no great liking for the 
specially religious novel, in which there is often an 
offensive intrusion of pious sentiment ; but that any 
one should undertake to portray conflicts of passion 
and emotion, to give what are designed to be faith- 
ful delineations of life, and yet ignore currents of 
thought and motives of action which enter into and 
radically color all phases of human existence and 



MR. BLUFF ON MODERN FICTION. 155 

human experience, is really very extraordinary. I 
have just been reading Black's " Macleod of Dare," 
and found myself in contact with people utterly 
without the religious instinct — who, oppressed by 
sorrows, suffering under misfortunes, thwarted in 
their hopes, plunged into grief and despair, exhibit 
not the slightest perception of a great Christian 
scheme which is specially designed to bring solace 
to the heavy-hearted and offer compensation in the 
future for sufferings endured here. Neither the 
grief-stricken mother and her attendants in Castle 
Dare, nor the gay pleasure-seekers in the heart of 
fashionable London, seem ever to have heard of 
such a thing as an overruling Providence, of such a 
trust as faith, of such a duty as submission, of such 
a promise as immortality, of such a possession as 
Christianity. This utter exclusion of religious thought 
I have named paganism, but even the pagans called 
upon their godSj and had vague surmises as to worlds 
beyond this, while these men and women are as in- 
sensible to every religious aspiration as so many 
statues. Now, the question is, was this elimination 
of Christianity conscious or unconscious — a delib- 
erate purpose to cast out God, or simply an evasion 
of an idea that would have uncomfortably compli- 
cated the artistic design of the author .^ The latter 
is probably the true solution, yet how is it that re- 



156 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



liglous convictions should thus complicate the pur- 
pose of a writer ? And how, assuming it to be true, 
is he privileged to disregard an important factor in 
his problem simply because it adds to his difficul- 
ties ? Black, as we all know, is skillful and tireless 
in his analysis of motive and feeling ; he penetrates 
the workings of the heart, and attempts to reveal all 
its mysteries, yet he deliberately eliminates a v/hole 
range of emotions, casts out a definite and powerful 
body of influences. Whether he is a believer or not 
makes no difference. Whatever his own religious con- 
victions may be, he was bound, I affirm, in depicting 
his imaginary people, to show them governed by the 
ideas and living under the conditions that pertain 
to men and women in real life. I am citing Mr. 
Black simply as a representative of the modern sec- 
ular novelist. In numerous other novels a similar 
paganism is evinced. Now, it is right enough, ar- 
tistically, for novelists to depict their heroes and 
heroines as rejecting Christianity; they may imagine 
at pleasure communities of infidels and pagans, and 
they may trace the growth of a man's heart and 
mind who has been educated in entire neglect of 
religion ; but how can they be justified in portray- 
ing characters who, being reared in the midst of 
Christian influences, yet act as if there were no such 
thing as Christianity .? I ask this question more in 



MR, BLUFF ON MODERN FICTION. 157 

the interest of art than of morals. I do not think it 
at all certain that novels would be chastened or their 
influence rendered better by the incorporation of 
religious sentiment — which may so readily be cari- 
catured or distorted. My argument simply is, that 
pictures of life can not be considered true or ade- 
quate that fail to measure the full sum of things 
that make up our civilization and go to form the 
average man and woman. 

Critic. I agree with you here fully. 



X. 



SOME OF MR. BLUFF'S POLITICAL NO- 
TIONS. 

{On the Train,) 

Bachelor Bluff, 
A Politician. 

" A GREAT Statesman," exclaimed Mr. Bluff, " is 
only a great negation." This was said in reply to a 
comment of his traveling companion, a distinguished 
politician. 

" Nothing more," retorted the politician, in a 
tone and with a smile of mild derision. Mr. Bluff 
caught the intonation and saw the smile. He gath- 
ered himself together at once, and replied with ani- 
mation : 

" Yes, a great negation, sir, and nothing else. 
His duty is simply to stand sentinel over the inter- 
ests of society in order to protect them from the 
presumptuous intermeddling of fools." 

" Undoubtedly," said the politician, " he must 



SOME OF MR. BLUFF'S POLITICAL NOTIONS. 159 

guard the interests of society, but that is a poor gen- 
eral who always remains on the defensive. Your 
statesman must advance ; he must originate ; he 
must organize rightful forces as well as restrain dan- 
gerous ones." 

*' Do not," said the Bachelor, " reason by anal- 
ogy. That is always misleading. What is required 
of generals is no criterion of what is required of 
statesmen. In society there are immense natural 
forces at work, which regulate affairs when left 
to their undisturbed operation far better than the 
wisest men that ever lived could do. Were it pos- 
sible for a man to arise who could comprehend all 
the intricate workings of society, who could follow 
through all their mazes the operations of the innu- 
merable threads that make up the complex web of 
life, we should have a statesman to whom we might 
gladly entrust the organization and direction of af- 
fairs ; but such a man, sir, would be too wise to 
thrust his hand into the complex social machinery. 
He might be able to see where a clog arrested the 
free action of the parts, where this or that thread 
met with obstructions, and by removing these ex- 
traneous things promote the general ease and smooth- 
ness of the movement — and this is all." 

" You believe, then, in a sort of government by 
nature — an adjustment of the whole complicated in- 



l6o BACHELOR BLUFF, 

terests of society by two or three primary principles. 
Your notions, sir, would work, perhaps, in element- 
ary conditions of society, but it needs, in an ad- 
vanced civilization, the supremest knowledge and 
highest skill to stand at the helm and successfully 
pilot the bark of state." 

" There is no such knowledge and no such skill," 
interrupted Mr. Bluff. " They have never been mani- 
fested. They have never been displayed, even by 
your greatest men." 

" Never, sir .? " 

" Never ! It is true there has grown up in the 
course of centuries a code of laws, written and un- 
written, which embody altogether a great deal of 
political wisdom — but this wisdom is almost wholly 
of a negative character. It has taken thousands of 
years for legislatures and courts of justice to dis- 
cover with some show of knowledge what men shall 
not and must not do ; but all the wise men of the 
world have not been able to wisely determine what 
men shall do — excepting, perhaps, the single thing, 
that they must render justice, that they must respect 
the rights and property of others. And yet all this 
is distinctly negative. Thou shalt not steal ! Thou 
shalt not murder ! Thou shalt not bear false wit- 
ness ! Thou shalt not commit adultery ! Here we 
have all the law, and all that courts and legislatures 



SOME OF MR. BLUFF'S POLITICAL NOTIONS. 161 

can rightly do is to compel their observance, or pun- 
ish their violation — that is, to create and maintain a 
thorough police. All other governmental direction 
of affairs can do nothing but work mischief; indeed, 
all other forms of governmental interference have done 
nothing but work mischief." 

" Nothing," said the politician, with smiling com- 
posure — "nothing but one vast, impassive, sublime 
negation ! No reforms for the innumerable evils of 
our social organizations, no plans for the education 
and intellectual development of the people, no 
thought of moral duties and spiritual life, no at- 
tempt to advance the race to higher planes of civili- 
zation." 

" By Jove, sir," roared the Bachelor, " you have 
the whole transcendental programme pat ! Who for a 
moment wishes to deter the advancement of civili- 
zation, and all that } I am talking about the du- 
ties of government, not the duties of the Church, or 
the college, or the Sunday-school — of those govern- 
mental duties which will enable the Church and the 
college, and all other institutions, to work out their 
purposes to the greatest and completest advantage. 
There is perpetually this confusion between the vol- 
untary social and religious forces of society and the 
administration of government. The other day I 
read in an essay by Froude, the historian, a passage 



l62 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

which, as I remember, ran as follows : ' A state of 
things in which the action of government is restrict- 
ed to the prevention of crime and statutable fraud, 
and where beyond these things all men are left to 
go their own way — to be honest or dishonest, pure 
or profligate, wise or ignorant, to lead what lives 
they please and preach what doctrines they please 
— may have been a necessary step in the evolution 
of humanity ; but, as surely, if no other principle 
had been ever heard of or acted on, civilization 
would have stood still, hardly above the level of 
barbarism.' " 

" Upon my word, sir," interrupted the politician, 
" this seems to me very sound argument. Where 
would civilization be without the aid and guidance 
of a wise authority ? " 

" Where, sir ? I do not know what wise au- 
thority would have done for us, but authority such 
as the world has experienced has rather held civili- 
zation by the throat. But what does Mr. Froude 
mean } Now, it is true that a society or community 
in which no other principle had ever been heard of 
than that of the ' prevention of crime and statutable 
fraud,' where men were honest or dishonest, pure or 
profligate, wise or ignorant, as they chanced, * would 
have stood still,' as Mr. Froude says, 'hardly above 
the level of barbarism.' But if this means that no 



SOME OF MR. BLUFF'S POLITICAL NOTIONS. 163 

community can rise above the level of barbarism 
where the government is actuated by no other prin- 
ciple than that of the prevention of crime and stat- 
utable fraud, then the argument, sir, is false through 
and through, from the foundation upward, and is 
false with such a curious inversion as to afford a re- 
markable illustration of how completely the records 
of the race can be misread. No community, obvi- 
ously, can advance in civilization unless there are 
powerful moral and intellectual forces at work ; but 
it so happens that the governments of the past, even 
the most paternal and the most illustrious, have com- 
monly obstructed rather than aided those forces. 
Governments have very much neglected the preven- 
tion of crime, have rarely efficiently punished stat- 
utable frauds, and they have been commonly in- 
tensely indifferent to the honesty or dishonesty, the 
purity or the profligacy, the wisdom or the igno- 
rance, of the people. They have, however, been 
very zealous in behalf of favorite ecclesiasticisms, 
and have endeavored with all their might to main- 
tain certain forms of religious belief. They have 
concerned themselves a good deal about dogma, but 
very little about morals ; they haven't cared a straw 
about the purity or profligacy of the community, but 
have looked well to see that the people have paid 
their tithes, and acknowledged the supremacy of the 



164 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

established Church. In pursuance of these purposes 
they have at various times constituted a good many 
statutable offenses which in equity were not offenses, 
and these fictitious crimes have been punished with 
abundant energy. At times when highways swarmed 
with banditti, when no one could venture abroad 
without means of defense, when robbery and vio- 
lence abounded, when neither life nor property was 
safe because of the gross neglect and indifference of 
the state, men and v/omen were zealously burned, 
and whipped, and imprisoned, for some defection in 
the way of religious belief. At times when roads 
were so neglected that travel was laborious and diffi- 
cult, and rivers were without bridges ; when on all 
sides was needed energetic administration in direc- 
tions that would advance the practical welfare of the 
people, rulers always exhibited zeal enough and 
found resources enough to build grand cathedrals 
and fine palaces. The whole history of govern- 
ment, I affirm, is a record of meddlesome and oppres- 
sive things done and necessary things left undone. 
The state has always taxed trade, handicapped in- 
dustry, vexatiously embarrassed commerce, suppressed 
opinion, retarded the growth of knowledge, hin- 
dered intellectual activity, and proved itself in nu- 
merous things a common nuisance. It has always 
so retarded civilization, either by its interferences 



SOME OF MR. BLUFF'S POLITICAL NOTIONS. 165 

or its neglects, that advance has been rendered 
possible only by controlling and subordinating it, by 
virtually dethroning it, by compelling it to keep 
within or nearly within its proper province. Rulers 
have never understood that, by simply limiting the 
function of government to the preservation of order, 
they would more effectually than by any other means 
bring all the forces of society into full and free ac- 
tivity. In view of the wretched mistakes and appall- 
ing crimes governments have thus committed, it is 
amazing to see a man like Mr. Froude confound 
things in the way he does — wholly confusing the 
forces that underlie government with the restrictions 
that operate in the name of government. The more 
we study the past the more it becomes evident that, 
while government is indispensable up to a certain 
point, our civilization has advanced in spite of it 
rather than by its aid. Governments have created 
more disorders than they have suppressed ; they 
have made dangerous classes by their oppression and 
injustice ; and, while we are not yet far enough 
advanced to do without them altogether, it is im- 
portant to keep them closely to their proper work. 
Let them preserve order and keep the peace. Art 
and letters and industrial energy will carry on civ- 
ilization triumphantly without their aid or interfer- 
ence. These things, indeed, so far have flourished 



l66 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

pretty nearly in direct ratio to the extent that gov- 
ernment has let them alone. The most important 
task now before the world is the subordination of 
government, forcing it within a rigid limitation of 
its powers and its duties." 

" It would be impossible," replied the politician, 
" to hold people together without governmental au- 
thority. We should see the strong subjugating the 
weak; security of life and property would be un- 
known." 

" Everybody knows that a police force must exist 
somewhere — a power to restrain the unruly, to pre- 
vent disorder. But it is absurd to suppose that the 
balance and stability of society are maintained by 
power or force of any kind. The millions of people 
in New York are not kept in order by fifteen hun- 
dred policemen ; this police is necessary to adjust 
the incidental frictions that occur, and to repress 
the dangerous tendencies of an unruly few. Order 
is maintained among the mass because their inter- 
ests are on the side of order. Wherever they are 
not on the side of order, nothing but a military des- 
potism can maintain peace or security of any kind. 
To repress the unruly and adjust incidental colli- 
sions are the purposes of state machinery, but these 
are the very things that your ideal government has 
for the most part neglected. Politicians have been 



SOME OF AIR. BLUFF'S POLITICAL NOTIONS. 167 

too busy with the intrigues of courts, or occupied 
in the appropriation of spoils, to look very closely 
after the maintenance of order or the administration 
of justice, and have generally made one with the 
strong in their subjugation of the weak. The na- 
tions have been torn to pieces by the quarrels and 
contests of rulers, by their thirst for power, by their 
greed for wealth, by their furious jealousies ; and 
now and then a king or statesman has won immense 
fame by simply 7iot furthering these evils, by not 
proving himself a curse to the people he rules over. 
This is the best that can be said for any of them. 
Every principle of constitutional liberty, every ac- 
cepted political theory upon which our welfare rests, 
has come from the people, been forced upon rulers 
after many rebellions. Statesmen have invented 
nothing and discovered nothing; have never com- 
prehended the foundations of society, the operations 
of interests, or the action of social forces. Princi- 
ples have been discovered by philosophers in their 
closets, never by men in power. Statesmen have 
sometimes adopted the principles of philosophers — 
as in the case of Peel taking up the free trade of 
Adam Smith — but nothing valuable to mankind has 
come from the rulers of mankind ? " 

" Absolutely nothing, sir,^ " said the politician. 

" Absolutely nothing. The greatest political dis- 



l68 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

covery ever made is the principle that government 
has no rightful authority over the religious faiths 
of its subjects. It is absolutely impossible to over- 
state the importance of this principle — which our 
ancestors were the first to discover — v/hich deprives 
the state of a power that has wrought more ruin 
and brought more suffering than almost any one 
thing else. This v/as a great step toward the liber- 
ty, peace, and security of the subject, but it did not 
come from men in power, and it is a principle little 
understood throughout the world among those in 
authority even to-day. It was a great step ; but it 
is only one step. The next thing to establish is that 
government has nothing whatever to do with trade 
or commerce, except to protect it — by "protect," 
meaning simply police protection, guaranteeing to 
each man the right to work out his purposes, so long 
as they are not injurious to the purposes of others, 
in his own way, secure, unmolested, undisturbed." 

" Your fierce censure of governments," remarked 
the politician, " is simply a censure of the wrongs 
they have committed and the mistakes they have 
made. As, despite these wrongs and mistakes, the 
people have developed from rude barbarism to gen- 
eral intelligence and civilization, I must think that 
governments, as a whole, have not been so bad." 

" Civilization, sir, has advanced mainly in spite 



SOME OF MR. BLUFF'S POLITICAL NOTIONS. 169 

of government — that is, in spite of the restrictions, 
the burdens, and the oppressions of government as 
it has existed — for obviously no government at all 
would have been even worse than the hard master 
which has ruled in that name. It seems to me that 
this is a very important thing for the world to realize 
— and apparently a very difficult one, for every- 
where we see people adhering tenaciously to the 
notion that the state can remedy everything, that 
all things can be made sweet and comfortable if 
only the right laws are passed and enforced. Em- 
phatically we want right laws, but we want very 
few laws ; what people really need is to see that 
they owe to themselves and to nothing else such 
progress as they have made, that their well-being 
is the outcome of natural forces permitted to act 
without obstruction, that society is held together by 
its own internal coherence, and not by artificial 
pressure, and that it develops by its own element- 
ary forces, and not by the dictation or the author- 
ity of statutes or makers of statutes." 

" All people should be taught to love and re- 
spect authority." 

" They should be taught to respect rightful au- 
thority, and to hold fettered to the earth all other 
bonds. They should be taught to obey necessary 
laws, and to scatter to the winds all others." 



170 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



" Will they not mistake, and scatter to the winds 
wise laws? " 

" They would soon discover that order is neces- 
sary, and that laws must be maintained which pre- 
serve order, and that all others are monstrous im- 
pertinences. They will, I trust, in time discover that 
statecraft is not nearly so great a thing as it is 
supposed to be ; that the politician fills a place far 
transcending his importance. Now they most unduly 
exalt him. They hang upon his doings, discuss his 
theories and his projects, watch his movements, lis- 
ten to his utterances, and gossip about his intrigues. 
Glance at things at Washington, and the relation of 
the press and of the whole public to the doings 
there ! We see scores of correspondents transmit- 
ting to the journals in every section elaborate re- 
ports of idle personal squabbles in the Congressional 
chambers. We find ponderous sheets and almost 
endless books and pamphlets devoted to recording 
debates that, for the most part, relate to party disci- 
pline, to the distribution of spoils, or to contests for 
office. Who shall or shall not be collector of the 
revenues of New York, or who shall distribute the 
mails at Philadelphia — or some matter of similar 
import — is continually agitating the country from 
one end to the other. Issues of this character fill 
thousands of newspapers with rumors and discus- 



SOME OF MR. BLUFF'S POLITICAL NOTIONS. 171 

sions, load the mails with correspondence and pam- 
phlet-speeches, keep busy an army of telegraph - 
reporters, and fix the attention of the whole nation 
upon the actors in the senseless struggle. Is there 
anything else in the world so full of noise and 
sound, heat and agitation, in behalf of a matter so 
utterly insignificant ? From the assembling of Con- 
gress until its adjournment, all its doings are watched 
with a public concern which, to the philosophical 
observer, is supremely absurd. Rarely, indeed, do 
the political doings at the Capitol involve issues of 
any real importance. There is a little tinkering of 
the tariff, and an immense gathering of representa- 
tives of all sorts of interests to secure the tinkering 
to their special advantage ; there is a vast crowd of 
hungry office-seekers flowing into the lobbies of Con- 
gress and the antechambers of the departments ; 
there are levies and dinner-parties by the high offi- 
cials ; there are a great number of bills for the pro- 
motion of private ends continually urged upon the 
attention of the learned legislators ; there are fierce 
debates between wise leaders that agitate each po- 
litical faction to its center ; there are revelations 
of frauds, and explanations that explain them away, 
and more explanations that explain the explained ; 
there is an immense fund of gossip and scandal 
furnished for the delectation of idlers all over the 



172 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



land — and can any man say what there is more ? 
And the men who take part in this drama of fuss 
and fustian are held up as shining lights." 

" Assuredly," said the politician, " there are some 
capable statesmen among all our men in high posi- 
tion." 

" Oh, yes, they have abundance of capacity of 
a certain sort. Many of them have genius for de- 
bate ; are brilliant leaders of faction ; know admi- 
rably how to manage elections and create public 
opinion — but what statesman, so called, is identified 
with any principle } There is scarcely an instance 
where one of them exhibits a scientific knowledge 
of the subjects which he discusses ; rarely an oc- 
casion where one throws light upon any of the 
vexed social problems into which they thrust their 
crude legislation. Who is an acknowledged au- 
thority in political economy } Who has mastered 
the wages question } Who understands the opera- 
tions of finance and the laws of money "i Who 
even understands the principles of free government.? 
What politician, for instance, could have written 
Mill's essay on ' Liberty ' .? What politician any- 
where analyzes, sifts, reaches the inner meaning } 
Who does or can expound or explain primary prin- 
ciples in politics ? Your politicians are almost ex- 
clusively men who desire power; who are enamored 



SOME OF MR. BLUFF'S POLITICAL NOTIONS. 173 

of the public admiration that follows their useless 
vocation ; and they exhibit an unusual deal of skill 
in obtaining and holding power. I declare emphat- 
ically that this class riiiist be subordinated, must 
hold a lower place in public estimation, if the peo- 
ple are to advance to a higher plane of intellectual 
life. Men of ideas, of investigation, of scientific 
training and thought, of philosophical analysis, should 
fill a larger place in public thought. The politi- 
cians must be accepted as the necessary instruments 
of administering government, but whose doings are 
worth little more the attention now bestowed upon 
them than are the enactments in a police court." 

" In the administration of law, at least, we re- 
quire men of the highest character; and their duties 
are inferior to none." 

*' If our judges may be called politicians, then in 
this direction politicians should suffer no abridgment 
of power nor decay of influence; but the judiciary 
is more scientific than political in its training ; at 
least it commonly has and should have the exact 
scientific mind and the philosophical insight — and 
with these qualities it may be safely intrusted with 
the highest public duty, the administration of jus- 
tice. If you argue that the makers of laws should 
have no secondary rank to those who administer 
laws, I reply that statute laws are commonly little 



174 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

more than the cumbersome experiments of politi- 
cians, while the common law is the embodiment of 
judicial analysis, and is one of the few things from 
the past of endurable value. When the limited uses 
of government are recognized, the influence and 
the power of the politician subordinated, and the 
public intelligence directed to the study of prin- 
ciples rather than to the partisanship of factions, 
we shall have, in my opinion, a more healthy public 
sentiment and a wiser national record." 

'* I see no chances of any such change," said 
the politician. 

" Yes ; it is likely that my hopes are father to 
my thoughts. But is it not amazing that people 
are so beset with the idea that it is the province 
of government to regulate everything and attempt 
everything? Even people who admit in some de- 
gree the limitation of government, are often bent 
upon government carrying out their own special 
notions. No one seems to see that, if the State 
attempts any one thing beyond its legitimate duties, 
it must and will attempt other things, until at last 
its busy intermeddling makes a host of mischiefs. 
If government, in obedience to a clamor from one 
quarter, is to establish scientific schools, then it 
will be urged by another class to found art-schools, 
and by still another class to organize music-schools. 



SOME OF MR. BLUFF'S POLITICAL NOTIONS. 



175 



In undertaking the education of the people at all, 
there is sure to be a continual pressure upon it to 
carry out this or the other favorite project by peo- 
ple who think that government ought to be not 
only paternal, but paternal in the particular direc- 
tion which they advocate. Some people want col- 
leges and schools supplied by government ; others 
want art-galleries and museums fostered by the State ; 
others think that the theatre and the opera should 
have the aid of the State; still others ask why lit- 
erature is not patronized by Congress; more practi- 
cal people insist that canals must be dug, and rail- 
ways and ships built, by government; there are still 
others who think that the telegraph and the express 
business should fall under State control; and so on, 
until, if all suggestions were carried out, pretty 
nearly the whole functions of society would be in 
the hands of our rulers. How is it, of all peoples, 
that Americans so disregard their own traditions 
and their own example in this matter } Have we 
not triumphantly shown what voluntary energies can 
do } Nowhere in the world is the Church so well 
supported, so active in its mission, so energetic and 
prosperous, as it is by the voluntary system in 
America. The Sunday-school is another example 
of what an immense work may be done by volun- 
tary energies. We may be certain that the success 



176 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

of the voluntary method in the Church and Sunday- 
school gives assurance that it would also be suc- 
cessful for education, aesthetic culture, and all prac- 
tical enterprises. The wonderful growth of America 
has been largely due to the fact that here more 
than elsewhere government gives every man free 
play and elbow-room. That is the whole secret 
of a wise government and a prosperous people. 
Let energies of all kinds have opportunity; regu- 
late only those things that obstruct energy, and our 
future well-being is assured." 

" I can at least agree with you," said the politi- 
cian, " so far as regards many unwise and some 
dishonest projects. So long as government enters 
only into rightly considered schemes, into measures 
calculated for the good of the whole public, I can 
see no danger in its exercise of power. The threat- 
ening feature of our politics is the corruption that 
prevails in political life." 

" This corruption is the inevitable consequence 
in republics of extended powers. Every man owns 
the government, he thinks, and schemes to milk it, 
and these schemes need not be dishonest in order 
to be dangerous. There is more to fear from the 
abundance of what may be called entirely honest 
schemes, than the few dishonest projects that get 
before our Legislatures. Dishonesty has, at its worst, 



SOME OF MR. BLUFF'S POLITICAL NOTIONS. 177 

Strict limits. The public danger is far more urgent 
in those things that have the public sanction, that 
in themselves are commendable, that appear desir- 
able for the public good, that enlist the enthusiasm 
and national pride of the people, that have the sup- 
port of worthy and cultured people, that seem, on 
their face, eminently proper things to do. It is 
the multiplication of functions in desirable things 
that threatens the permanent security of our politi- 
cal institutions. I repeat with emphasis that, if 
there is one thing more than another our public 
should learn, it is the necessity of subordinating 
government, of withdrawing from it every function 
not absolutely necessary, of remanding to the do- 
main of private enterprise the innumerable schemes 
continually brought before it, all calculated, however 
much they may be projected in the name of public 
good, to overweigh us with taxes, to foster lobbyism — 
one of the curses of the country — to increase bribery 
and corruption, to render legislation a means of 
serving innumerable personal ends, and by these 
hurtful influences, as well as by many practical inju- 
rious effects, to retard our prosperity, if not to de- 
stroy our institutions. Let us have done with it all. 
Can you not agree with me ? " 

" Where, then, sir, would be my vocation ? " 

" Where, indeed ? " 



XI. 

MR. BLUFF AS AN ARITHMETICIAN. 

{^In the Laboratory.') 

Mr. Bluff and a Believer in Infinitesimal Doses. 

Bluff. So you still adhere to the Hahnemann 
theory of infinitesimal doses. Is it as popular as 
ever .? 

Believer. More and more popular. It grows in 
favor every day, but perhaps there is not such gen- 
eral adherence to high dilutions. 

Bhcff. What are high dilutions .'* 

Believer. From the hundredth to the two hun- 
dredth. The larger number of practitioners, how- 
ever, probably do not go beyond the thirtieth deci- 
mal trituration. 

Bhff. Decimal triturations ! It was once alto- 
gether centesimal triturations, was it not } 

Believer. There is possibly a little modification 
here. The decimal is superseding the centesimal. 

Bluff, But that is a big change, between tens 



MR. BLUFF AS AN ARITHMETICIAN. 



179 



and hundreds. However, if one believes in these 
triturations, he is not likely to care much whether 
his drug comes through a hogshead or so of water 
more or less. 

Believer. Hogsheads of water } Why do you 
exaggerate in this unfair manner } 

Bluff. Exaggerate.? Let us look into your charge 
a little. Drugs, you say, are attenuated through 
thirty dilutions — we will not explore the region of 
the high potencies. Now, what is a dilution } To 
begin, what is the first decimal dilution ? 

Believer, One grain of a drug, or the mother- 
tincture, diluted in nine drops of alcohol or water. 

Bluff. So I understand. And the second dilu- 
tion is a drop of the first dilution in nine drops of 
alcohol or water — let us say water. And the third 
is a drop of the second similarly diluted through 
nine parts of water ; and the fourth is a drop of the 
third similarly attenuated, and so on. Am I right .? 

Believer. Distinctly so. 

Bluff. I am delighted to hear you say so. Are 
you in a humor for a little arithmetic } Out with 
your pencil, then, and set down how many drops of 
water are required for the thirtieth dilution — that is, 
how many drops of water would be required if we 
carried the whole of the mother-tincture through thirty 
attenuations. It is ten drops for the first — that is, 



l8o BACHELOR BLUFF. 

the tincture and the water make ten — a hundred in 
the second, a thousand in the third. 

Believer. Quite right. 

Bluff. Yes ; it is exactly so. We continue to 
multiply by ten. The fourth dilution makes 10,000 
drops; the fifth 100,000. But we may as well jump 
the intermediate dilutions and set down 1,000,000,- 
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 drops as the requi- 
site number for the thirtieth — being just one nonill- 
ion, that being the term for the eleventh group of 
numeral orders. I am afraid a good many hogs- 
heads of water would be required to hold this num- 
ber of drops. Have you a liquid scale at hand.? 

Believer. Not at the moment. 

Bluff. That is unfortunate, for you will have to 
take my word for it that there are 61,440 drops in 
a gallon. Now, the large Croton Reservoir — 

Believer. The Croton Reservoir! What are you 
driving at ? 

Bluff. Wait and see. The capacity of the great 
Croton Reservoir in Central Park is one billion and 
thirty million gallons : 1,030,000,000 multiplied by 
61,440 give us, as a result, 63,283,200,000,000, or, let 
us say in round numbers, sixty-three trillions of drops 
of water. This is the contents in drops of the 
reservoir. It is a large number, but a glance at 
the two lines of figures shows us at once that it is 



MR. BLUFF AS AN ARITHMETICIAN. 



181 



not nearly enough for the thirty dilutions. How 
many reservoirs will give it, then ? Let us divide 
our one nonillion by these sixty-three trillions, and 
see. Can you carry the figures in your mind's eye } 
Let me set them down for you. Here they are : 
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, divided by 
63,000,000,000,000, give us — Wonder of wonders ! 

Believer. Well, what is it } Give us the figures, 
and not exclamations. 

Bluff. For my part, they take my breath away. 
For, my dear sir, in order to put a drop of mother- 
tincture— the whole drop, understand— through thirty 
dilutions, we should need nearly sixteen quadrillion 
RESERVOIRS of the capacity of that in Central Park ! 
Here are the exact figures — 15,873,015,873,015,873, 
and a fraction. This is dilution with a vengeance. 

Believer. Can there be so much fresh water on 
the continent ? 

Bluff. So much fresh water on the cojitinent I My 
good sir, you have little idea of what this amount 
of water means. In fact, it is impossible for the 
human mind to grasp a number so large as this ; so 
let us see if we can express the amount of liquid 
required in larger bulks with fewer numerals. I 
do not knov/ the area of the Central Park reservoir, 
but upon the map it appears to be about half a mile 
in extent in one direction, and a little less in the 



l82 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

Other, but it tapers somewhat toward one end. Now, 
if we estimate that a mile square would contain 
five such reservoirs, we are pretty close to the facts 
— sufficiently so for our present purpose. The geog- 
raphers estimate the entire surface of the world to 
be about two hundred million square miles. The 
surface of the world is, then, capable of containing 
one billion reservoirs like that of Central Park. 
But we want space for over fifteen billion such 
reservoirs; and to hold this number you will find 
that we should absolutely require 15,873,015 worlds, 
and a fraction ! Here are the figures. Nearly sixteen 
million worlds, the entire surface of each being cov- 
ered with water. 

Believer. But the Croton Reservoir is compara- 
tively shallow. 

Bluff. Not more than fifty or sixty feet deep — 
let us say fifty feet. Let us therefore deepen our 
bilHon reservoirs standing on the surface of the 
globe, until they extend downward to the center, 
becoming, say, four thousand miles deep, that being 
about one half the diameter of the earth at the 
equator. This will increase their capacity some four 
hundred and twenty - two thousand times (that is, 
would do so if their area were uniformly main- 
tained) ; so that, if the world were composed wholly 
of water, it would require, at the very least, roughly 



MR. BLUFF AS AN ARITHMETICIAN. 



183 



calculated, more than forty worlds in order to ob- 
tain one nonillion drops of water — that is, understand, 
to put the mother-tincture through thirty decimal 
dilutions. If the world were a cube instead of a 
sphere, a tolerably exact calculation could be given : 
it would then require nearly thirty- eight worlds of 
water; as it is, if we say forty-five, we shall un- 
derstate the number, but a few worlds of water 
more or less are of no moment. Now, remember 
that for every dilution we must multiply the pre- 
ceding sum by ten. It would thus require four 
hundred and fifty worlds of water for the thirty- 
first dilution,- four thousand five hundred for the 
thirty-second, and so on, the fortieth dilution need- 
ing four hundred and fifty billion worlds of water ! ! 
If the twenty million stars which the great tele- 
scopes reveal in the heavens were all composed of 
liquid, they would not nearly supply water enough, 
unless averaging twenty-two thousand five hundred 
times larger than our world, to put one drop of 
tincture through forty dilutions — and yet people are 
constantly cured by doses of the one-hundredth dilu- 
tion ! 

Believer. This is preposterous ! 

Bluff. So it is — but the figures are approxinlately 
correct, nevertheless. Verify them for yourself. But 
understand, it is easy enough to get the thirtieth dilu- 



l84 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

tion. Thirty vials, containing ten drops of water 
each, would enable you to do so — but a drop from 
the thirtieth vial would be equivalent to one nonill- 
ionth of the original drug. 

Believer. You are in some way altogether out, 
for homoeopathy is brilliantly successful. 

Bluff. My dear sir, the vital principle of homoe- 
opathy is sbnilia si?mlibus curaniur — " like cures like " 
— as we all know, and practitioners may at their 
pleasure give doses from the crude drug to the two 
hundredth dilution. I therefore say nothing about 
homoeopathy — indeed, I find no fault with infini- 
tesimal doses, if anybody likes them. I should pre- 
fer myself ten drops of the thirtieth dilution to ten 
drops too much of any drug you may name. I 
affirm nothing ; I deny nothing — I have simply 
amused myself with a few figures, that is all. 



XII. 



MR. BLUFF'S MEDITATIONS IN AN ART- 
GALLERY. 

Bachelor Bluff, solus. 

" I THINK I am a lover of art, but how tire- 



some is the ceaseless cant about its divine and ele- 
vating character ! Has any of the arts — sculpture, 
painting, architecture, even music or poetry — ever 
exercised an elevating influence upon a people 1 
Absolutely, we have only to look back to see that 
purely art-loving peoples have been among the most 
cruel, vicious, and morally degraded of all civilized 
communities. If one looks at Italy, where art in its 
varied forms has been more dominant and pervad- 
ing than in any other country in the world, he can 
not fail to suspect that art, instead of elevating a 
people, may lend itself with fatal facility to their 
decline. The real basis of every people's advance, 
after all, is the diffusion of knowledge. Art with a 
people of intellectual activity and culture falls into 



l86 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

its due and proper place, which is that of a grace- 
ful fringe to civilization. It indisputably supplies 
ideas and pleasurable sensations, and gives to char- 
acter some of its most agreeable qualities ; without 
it, life would be barren and harsh enough. But 
the suitable comprehension and appropriation of art 
come only with intellectual culture. With people 
who are slothful and ignorant, it relaxes fiber, fills 
the imagination with dreams and sensuous pictures, 
and helps to render the whole nature a chaos of 
emotions and passions. However admirable sensi- 
bility in an individual may seem, nothing is more 
true that in eras or with peoples where the un- 
trained imagination has sway, human nature exhib- 
its strange phases of depravity. Religion itself suc- 
cumbs to it, and moral principles are converted into 
3esthetic ecstasies. There is only one real basis of 
advancement, and that is intellectual — the increase 
of knowledge, the domination of reason over imagi- 
nation, the subordination of feeling and emotion to 
the judgment. 

" Then, there is the spiritual element in art. 



of which some critics write. Is there such a thing.? 
Is spiritualism in art anything more than a vague 
sentiment, a piece of transcendental ecstasy .'* Art, 
no doubt, is capable of exercising no little power 



MEDITATIONS IN AN ART-GALLERY. 187 

over our emotional susceptibilities, but it is no new 
thing to imcigine that our sensuous emotions have 
their birth in the spirit, and are a form of divine 
exaltation. Beauty and harmony move us greatly ; 
there is, indeed, something strange and subtile in the 
delightful sensations which measured sound and har- 
monies of color and line awaken in us, but it is 
quite possible that, if the spirit of man were wholly 
freed from the influences and seductions of the 
senses, color and sound would cease to agitate it, or 
physical beauty have any meaning for it. One does 
not find the races with whom or the epochs in 
which spiritual life has been the most exalted falling 
under the dominion of art ; nor have persons of the 
finest spiritual strain shown either the need or much 
of the influence of art. Art charms only the hu- 
man side of us. Perhaps the Quakers, in their rigid 
exclusion of music and color from their spiritual 
exercises, are philosophically right. But they shut 
music and color out from their lives altogether. 
Possibly men and women who live in a perpetual in- 
ward light can do this, but mortals generally live 
through the senses. Symonds speaks of art becom- 
ing from the time of Giotto to Raphael the sole 
exponent of the overmastering religious emotions of 
the age ; but was it not far more truly an exponent 
of the passion for a sensuous form of religion 



i88 BACHELOR BLUFF: 

rather than for its spiritual bliss — for the pomp, 
the music, the color, the splendor of a grand pic- 
torial worship, rather than for inner light and 
grace ? The Renaissance was a grand revival of 
art, but the Reformation was a grander spiritual 
awakening, in the heat of which art and all the 
emotions that art excites were consumed, I can 
not sympathize with that form of religious fervor 
that fortifies the sensibilities against beauty ; but 
there is no denying the fact that intense spiritual 
life renders everything else in the world valueless. 
It rises to a plane to which art with all its mani- 
fold seductions can not rise. And this is also true 
of pure intellectual life. Sound and color have 
very little fascination, I fancy, for the mind en- 
grossed in the study of great problems, or deeply 
concerned in any pursuit of an engrossing char- 
acter. Neither great reformers nor great thinkers 
have exhibited much susceptibility to art, at least in 
its forms of painting and sculpture. 

"But art nevertheless has great control over the 
human heart. Has it more than beauty in nature 
has } Are the emotions that it awakens in any way 
different.^ When one looks upon the ravishing 
beauty of a 'maiden in her flower,' can it be pre- 
tended that the sensations thus awakened are — diffi- 
cult as they are to analyze or to comprehend — in 



MEDITATIONS IN AN ART-GALLERY. 189 

any wise more than a delight of the senses — an in- 
explicable emotion which color and contour, fresh- 
ness and grace, have the power to excite ? Does 
loveliness in marble awaken emotions other than 
those that loveliness in flesh stimulates, unless it be 
the single one of admiration for the skill of the 
copyist ? It is a great temptation, no doubt, to re- 
mand the strange agitations of the senses to the 
spirit ; they are certainly subtile and profound enough 
to escape dissection ; but we exalt ourselves by illu- 
sions if we fall into the habit of thinking that the 
delights of the senses, so often enjoyed at the cost 
of spiritual purity, are really identical with the fe- 
licities of the soul. But, dear me, see how I moral- 
ize, and I came simply to look at some pictures ! 

" Well, there are many pleasing pictures here, 

but I have discovered in my travels more charming 
natural ones. That is human nature. We are all of 
us continually finding wonderful picturesque groups 
and lovely compositions of colors, and begging the 
artists to come and paint them for us. But the ar- 
tists themselves are quite sure they have discovered 
charming scenes, and wonder how the world can be 
so cold and insensible. But who can see what the 
artist sees — who could see what I saw in the pict- 
ures I have discovered, let them be ever so well 



190 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



painted ? To the artist all the pigments on his can- 
vas are united with the life, the color, the motion of 
the original scene. When he looks upon the can- 
vas the mind acts as well as the eyes see ; he per- 
ceives not so much what is as what he remembers j 
the cheeks of his painted people suffuse with color; 
their eyes sparkle ; the light laugh breaks from their 
lips ; the shadows of the trees dance and play ; the 
winds lift the stray locks of hair and bring deli- 
cious odors ; the air is soft and sweet, and sends 
tingling pleasure through the veins ; of all these 
things, the pigments speak to him, but they have no 
such message to others, unless, indeed, a rare spirit 
comes, one unusually imaginative and receptive, who 
has taught himself to look behind the composition 
on the canvas to the thought in the artist's mind. 
This is a great limitation to art. And how complete 
the limit is in portrait-painting ! — for who can get a 
true idea of a face from the most skillfully painted 
copy of it } The likeness of a person I have known 
recalls to my imagination the expression of his feat- 
ures, the light of his eye, his tone, and voice, and 
manner ; it is the operation of my own mind work- 
ing in cooperation with what the painter has done 
that creates the likeness — that transfuses with real 
life the dead image before me. But portraits of 
people we have not met are but faint images of their 



MEDITATIONS IN AN ART-GALLERY. 191 

originals, or they are misleading ones, as we dis- 
cover if at a later time we meet them. We thus 
not only see differently because of different tempera- 
ments, but differently because of the absence or 
presence of associated ideas. Half of the power in 
a picture that moves me comes in this way from 
myself. 

" This notion is applicable to what has re- 



cently been said about the human element in land- 
scape-painting. It is necessary, say one class of 
critics, that landscape-painting should possess hu- 
man interest — some connection with man's doings — 
in order to give it any real or permanent hold upon 
our sympathies. But does a painting really possess 
human sentiment simply by putting human figures 
in it "i Do I care for yonder seashore because there 
are figures of women and children upon the beach, 
more than for this mountain-stream, where there 
are no signs of human life .? I might, perhaps, if 
the figures were really human — if they touched me 
in some definite way. But even critics who require 
human sentiment admit that it may be accomplished 
by suggestion. One of them, I remember, cites 
Stanfield's * The Abandoned * — a dismantled ship 
rocking on a stormy sea — and thinks that the con- 
nection of the ship with man, the sort of semi- 



192 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

humanity which the title suggests, gives a real force 
and interest to the painting, which waves and sky- 
could not produce. Yes ; there must be in this 
way, or in some way, human interest — but perhaps 
the most powerful human sympathy may come from 
associated ideas, from the memories that a painting 
awakens, from its power to touch the imagination 
or the sympathies. If a painting, for instance, of a 
forest interior, the solitudes of which are disturbed 
by no human presence, is full of imaginative power 
and strong sympathies — if the painter felt and ex- 
pressed the scene in all its beauties and charms — 
the spectator identifies with it the full beat of hu- 
man interest. The cool shadows are to him a dream 
of delicious rest ; the fall of the brook over the 
stones sends musical murmurs to his ear ; he feels 
the pleasant wind fan his cheek ; the sunshine that 
flecks through the leaves charms his eye with its 
shifting play of light ; odors from the mosses and 
aromatic plants seem to fill his nostrils ; the scene 
in its completeness takes possession of his whole 
nature, fills him with a subdued rapture, becomes 
an embodiment of his emotions. If a forest-sc^ne 
has no power of this kind over one's imagination, 
it is really less than nothing, for the value and 
charm of any picture must lie in its control over hu- 
man thought, in its power to transport the spectator 



MEDITATIONS IN AN ART-GALLERY. 193 

to the scene and permit him to fill it with his own 
personality. In this way a human element clearly 
often does enter landscape art effectively, efficiently, 
and to the complete identification of the scene with 
our emotions and our susceptibilities. The mere 
introduction of figures obviously can not of itself 
create human interest; if they form a part of the 
picture in such a way as to strengthen the senti- 
ment of the landscape, well and good; if not, they 
weaken if they do not destroy the very human in- 
terest to the end of which they are imported into 
the scene. In fact, the value and character of a 
painting do not depend upon fixed rules at all, but 
upon the imagination of the painter, lacking which 
his human figures will have no human vitality or 
hold ; possessing which, his solemn, empty forest- 
depths will be full of human feeling. 

" And yet, one longs sometimes for pas- 



sionate stir in pictures. The landscapes that I have 

seen have great charm, but what landscape can 

send a passionate throb from the heart } Viewed 

that way, how wearisome almost all art is ! There 

is an abundance of artistic device, of munificent 

color, of excellent execution, of agreeable ideas ; 

but when does anything take an immense hold 

upon one's sympathies .'' Our artists ignore the 
9 



[94 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



aspirations, the emotions, and the passions of the 
race ; and yet the hold an art has upon a people 
must depend upon the measure of human passion 
there is in it. People haunt the galleries in search 
of the greatly beautiful ; they yearn for stories upon 
canvas that shall fill them with exalted pleasure ; 
they long for the profounder passion, for the thrill 
of intense sympathy. The universal hold that art 
in old times held upon the people was due to in- 
tense mutual sympathies ; art expressed the fervor, 
the religious ecstasy, the deep-seated feelings of 
the whole body of the people — now it addresses a 
few blasd critics and jaded connoisseurs. What if 
some painter should arise who painted for us great 
themes in a great manner.? There would be a dif- 
ferent public in our galleries then — the passionate, 
warm-hearted, large-souled multitude would be there ; 
such a painter would convey to the hearts of mill- 
ions lessons of heroism, of fortitude, of faith, of 
affection, of divine beauty. Perhaps all this is too 
much for human genius. George Eliot, I recollect, 
declares that 'the instances are scattered but thinly 
over the galleries of Europe, in which the fortune 
or selection even of the chief masters has given to 
art a face at once young, grand, and beautiful.' It 
is strange that youth and noble beauty should be 
so difficult. Nor can I say that I much like the 



MEDITATIONS IN AN ART-GALLERY. 



195 



grand themes of the old painters as they present 
them. Is it possible to be satisfied with any of the 
crucifixions ? Some beautiful figures, some noble 
faces — but what forced composition in almost every 
instance! And as for, the contorted and distorted 
Christs scattered throughout the Continent, they are 
simply appalling. The examples of physical agony 
found in all the old churches show the rude, 
bloody, melodramatic kind of art that was em- 
ployed to reach and excite the people. Am I to 
argue, then, that the attempt now to paint great 
themes would end in coarse sensation? It would 
in some hands, no doubt ; in fact, I fear the result 
of grand themes now as much as I hoped for them 
a moment ago. I remember that a * Laughing Boy,* 
by Murillo, in Warwick Castle, fascinated me much 
more than that painter's ' Assumption ' at the Louvre. 
But this is because the ' Assumption ' is too great a 
theme for any human skill ; and so is the * Cruci- 
fixion'; so is the figure of Christ — but there are 
some grand heads of Christ, witness Correggio's and 
Guido's. It is impossible not to wish for a stirring, 
heroic art, but one feels the danger of it. 

" Old art did certainly have some relation 



to currents of thought and national tendency. Now 
art is really as iar from the people as if it were so 



196 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

many hieroglyphs. An English reviewer has lately 
written of the reflection of national character in 
national art. Neither in England nor here is there 
any such thing. There is no common ground of feel- 
ing, no common standard of judgment, no accepted 
basis of appreciation or interchange of ideas. The 
art world is a world of its own, wherein the cult- 
ure, the ideas, the aspirations, are essentially differ- 
ent from the ideas and purposes of the rest of the 
community. Even literary circles have for the most 
part little in common with art circles, poets and 
writers being generally a little more ignorant of art 
beyond its historical phase, and more indifferent to 
it, than any other class. Artists here, for the most 
part, simply address one another, and a small circle 
of admirers. American painters are commonly cau- 
tious, conventional, simple-minded, with no theatri- 
cal fondness for sensation or extravagance, loving 
their art in its minor chords, so to speak; appre- 
ciating delicacy and purity of expression much more 
than stirring action. Our people, on the other hand, 
are bold and restless, full cf invention, delighting 
in novelty, ambitious for great successes, audacious 
in conception, and inclined to emphasis and exag- 
geration in all that they utter. Judging from our 
national characteristics, we should show in our art 
vigorous movement, great audacity, boldness, and a 



MEDITATIONS IN AN ART-GALLERY. 197 

passion for large themes ; but how completely the 
reverse are the facts ! The same strange contradic- 
tion is apparent in England. There is a domestic 
art there that is very popular, and it hits the taste 
of a large public, but this is only one side of the 
British mind. Britons scarcely less than ourselves 
are restless and ambitious ; they push colonizing 
schemes into remote quarters ; their ships penetrate 
every sea ; they have shown, and are showing, im- 
mense audacity, enterprise, and a spirit of aggran- 
dizement — all of which has some place in their 
writings, but scarcely any in their art. Recently 
English artists have exhibited a great fondness for 
classical subjects, the exhibitions being full of paint- 
ings of Greek and Roman scenes, and yet it would 
be difficult to imagine anything more radically op- 
posed than is the rugged, picturesque, and barbaric 
English character to the refined Greek. French art 
is doubtless nearer to national character than either 
British or American art ; but painters like Corot and 
Millet have nothing in common with the attributes 
usually accredited to French character — with those 
painters extravagance and theatrical sensation being 
utterly unknown. The fact is, the larger number 
of artists and writers are too often Bohemians, with 
erratic tastes and wholly independent modes of 
thought, and for these reasons, if for no other, are 



198 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

not always calculated by their natural bent to show 
the age and body of the time, its ' form and press- 
ure.' It is clear that national character must not 
be sought for in art — which is proof that art is 
essentially an exotic ; that it lies upon the surface 
for the amusement of a few. To the community 
generally it is an idle and practically worthless thing, 
which may in some degree be accepted, but which 
has very little place in the earnest interests of life. 
Can there be a great national art until all this is 
changed } 

" How many vagaries art has fallen into of 

late ! The vague, the unknown, the untranslatable, 
are now hotly advocated as rightful substitutes for 
clearness, precision, and revelation. There are crit- 
ics who appear to gauge their estimate of a picture 
by the sum of eccentricity it displays; and we act- 
ually find undecipherable smudges held up as suit- 
able examples of landscape-painting ! It is very 
puzzling, and the puzzle is not less by calling these 
performances " impression " pictures. They certainly 
impress the uninstructed beholder, but not in a way 
to give comfort to the artist. Why, in fact, are 
they specially " impression " pictures ? They give im- 
pressions of nothing but of the incomprehensible ; 
or, if they are records of impressions, a key is 



MEDITATIONS IN AN ART-GALLERY. 



199 



needed to translate them. An impression, accord- 
ing to some authorities, is an attempt to fix upon 
canvas the instantaneous impression of a scene — to 
catch a changing mood of feeling, a fleeting touch of 
color, a vanishing light, a sudden insight or grasp 
— in other words, to take a landscape on the wing, 
as it were. If it were possible to do this well, 
perhaps something would be accomplished worth 
the effort. But wherein do transitory impressions 
differ from permanent ones ? In the complex action 
of the mind, it is impossible, even in an instan- 
taneous impression of an object, to obliterate the 
host of associations and the sum of experiences 
gathered there. We know the human features so 
well that the most rapid glance at a face conceiv- 
able is sure to bring before us all the parts — the 
eyes, the cheeks, the nose, the mouth, all are sure 
to distinctly appear, if not in actual vision at least 
by associations that are inseparable from the vision. 
The flash of lightning that reveals a figure reveals 
it to our mental impressions complete. Each of us 
knows a tree so well, carries in his mind its color, 
its construction, its play of light and shade, that 
the eye, sweeping over a forest in the swiftest man- 
ner possible, will inevitably have just as instantane- 
ously an impression of the forms of the trees, their 
spread of bough, their recesses of shadow, their 



200 BACHELOR BLUFF, 

leaves gleaming and quivering in the light, as it 
has of the fact that there are trees there at all. To 
think of a tree is to think of something defined, 
of something possessing known characteristics ; and 
under no circumstances, I am convinced, would it 
be possible for the human vision to catch a glimpse 
of trees so swiftly as to make them seem anything 
less, or anything different, or anything more, than 
just what they are. It will be said that we do not, 
in fact, see the complete tree under such circum- 
stances, but only think we do. This makes no 
difference, for it is with what seems that art has 
solely to do. It is not dealing with the science of 
optics, but with appearances. 

" The impressionists, it seems, condemn 



Jinish in pictures. No doubt an ignorant notion 
prevails that smoothness and polish are the crown- 
ing qualities of a picture, and this form of emascu- 
lated prettiness should be denounced. But people 
who rush to the extreme of preferring rudeness and 
slap-dash to that true finish which completes and 
helps to render perfect, coram.it as absurd an error of 
judgment. There is a kind of finish which every one 
is entitled to expect in a work of art — the sort of 
finish found in the great masters. Artists of all 
schools and critics of all varieties of caprice have 



MEDITATIONS IN AN ART-GALLERY. 201 

no difficulty in admiring Rubens, Raphael, Murillo, 
Titian, Vandyck, and the host of great painters. 
There is no dispute in regard to these painters as to 
what is * finish ' and what is not ; their paintings are 
felt to be complete ; they are vital, they are rich in 
texture and color, definite as to form, satisfying as 
to drawing ; they take possession of us fully ; they 
give no opportunity for men to say they are lacking, 
whether in force or in finish. What new dogma is 
this, then, that, so long as color is heaped on in a 
vigorous manner, a picture must be accepted as 
complete, however crude and raw it may seem, how- 
ever absolute is the evidence that the artist stopped 
before he had done } 

" And their lack of finish is nine times out of 
ten simply inability to give finish. The sketches of 
almost every artist show indications of skill ; the be- 
ginnings of art are always easy. It is only when 
sketches are developed into pictures that the full 
resources of the artist, his limitations as well as his 
resources, are made known. Many a sketch indi- 
cates breadth, freedom, ease, virility : the difficulty 
is, how to carry these qualities on to their legitimate 
end ; how to do more than indicate and suggest — 
that is, how to perfomn. In every art just this diffi- 
culty arises. Many are the poets that have good 
ideas, readiness, abundant invention ; but very few 



202 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

are the poets who attain sufficient mastery over their 
art to give the last finish, the touch of completeness, 
to their work ; and it is just this touch of complete- 
ness, this supreme finish, that separates great poetry 
from inferior poetry. The lesser poets are not so 
deficient in ideas as they are in knowledge of their 
art — that is, how to complete. There are thousands 
of stories and romances written that show lively im- 
agination, considerable invention, good native talent 
— but how few that come up to the high standard 
of finish and completeness that alone make great- 
ness ! Any sculptor can model the outlines of a 
figure ; apprentices do this much in every Italian 
atelier j it is exactly in and by foiish that the accom- 
plished master steps in and lifts the work to perfec- 
tion. Painting is not different from the other arts 
in this particular. Every recognized great painting 
that exists is * finished ' ; every painting, in order to 
be great or worthy, 7jmst be finished — not made 
smooth or polished, of course, but brought to that 
state of completeness that the methods and processes 
of the work are hidden, so that one who looks at it 
sees textures and not paint, force by nature of com- 
pleteness and not by ruggedness, things and not 
guesses at things. 

" But, after all, why should there be theories 



MEDITATIONS IN AN ART-GALLERY. 



203 



— why fixed, preconceived notions ? If a man has 
anything to declare in art or letters, let him choose 
his own methods. Criticism here is apt to be simply 
impertinent. It is one's duty to stand before any 
work of art solely to receive impressions — not to for- 
mulate laws, but to discover intentions. I surrender 
myself, therefore, to these paintings ; I banish from 
my mind all prejudices, all preconceived notions, all 
forms of self-assertion. Let them impress me, each 
in its own way and to its own end. Let them 
awaken in me the sense of beauty, stir my fancy, fill 
me with some emotion, reveal some truth, produce 
what impression they can. Willing as I am, they 
should certainly justify their being in some way. Is 
it I that am cold and insensible, or the paintings 
that are meaningless .'' There must be something 
more than willingness, doubtless, to understand a 
painting ; knowledge, p.erhaps, is necessary in order 
that one may understand what the painter means, 
and thus derive rights impressions. Knowledge, in- 
disputably, is necessary in order to comprehend how 
effects are produced, but why should it be neces- 
sary simply to feel effects ? How much knowledge 
is necessary to appreciate the splendor of a sunset } 
How much to feel the beauty of the sky, or of a 
rose .^ Very likely cultivation has done something 
for us in developing susceptibility to the beauties 



204 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

of Nature, but there is no class excluded from her. 
Every person with a little native imagination de- 
lights in the colors and forms that she produces on 
her grand canvases. If it needs no inculcation in 
subtile mysteries to see the beauties of Nature, why 
does it in art } If I have susceptibility in the gal- 
leries of the forests, and thus fall under the influ- 
ence of glancing lights and mellowed vistas, assured- 
ly the beauties that the painters reproduce ought to 
influence me also. It requires knowledge to read 
accurately and freely all that a painter puts in his 
painting, but, if he has unmistakably expressed true 
beauty there, very few are incapable of seeing it 
and feeling it in some degree. There must be re- 
sponse in him that looks, but there must be force in 
him that produces. If after I have surrendered my- 
self fully to a painting, and it fails to awaken sen- 
sations, then I may inquire ^hy — and here criticism 
legitimately steps in. If the artist has ideas, let us 
accept them, whether we qui^e agree with them or 
not, and be silent; if he has not ideas, then we are 
masters, not he, and may demand an account." 



XIII. 



MR. BLUFF ON MELANCHOLY. 

{On a Vac /if, on a Moonlit Eveni?ig.) 

Miranda, 
Bachelor Bluff, 
Oscar. 

''I LOVE moonlight," said Miranda, "and espe- 
cially moonlight on the water — it is so melancholy 
and sweet." 

'' And you like, no doubt," said Mr. Bluff, a little 
sarcastically, " melancholy music, to make all in 
keeping. I dare say you are fond of imagining 
yourself Jessica, sitting with Lorenzo and listen- 
ing to his soft murmur about the moonlight sleeping 
upon the bank, and the sounds of music, and touch- 
es of sweet harmony, etc. You could, I am sure, 
repeat the whole passage now, if put to it." 

" What sentimental young lady could not } " re- 
marked Oscar, as he touched lightly with his finger 
the ashes on his cigar. 

" Or sentimental young gentleman," retorted Mi- 



2o6 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

randa. " Were there ever lovers that did not read 
that passage together ? I believe I can count a 
dozen melancholy j^oung gentlemen who, in moon- 
light walks or sails, have whispered in my ear, * How 
sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank ! ' " 

" It is a very pretty piece of poetry," said Mr. 
Bluff, " and Shakespeare then was in his best poeti- 
cal mood. But I am not fond of moonlight, or of 
melancholy in any of its forms Give me the splen- 
dor of the sun, and Nature when she is joyous." 

" I thought," replied Miranda, " that all old 
bachelors are melancholy. I should say it would be 
natural to them." 

" It is very perverse and wrong-headed in me, 
no doubt, not to be sad and melancholy," said Mr. 
Bluff. " It is rather a reflection on your sex, I con- 
fess, who are disposed to believe that all old bache- 
lors must inevitably be unhappy. I think myself 
that it is very ungrateful for us to persist in be- 
ing happy when so many lovely women are anxious 
to be the source of our bliss." 

" If lovely women," remarked Oscar, who was 
gazing abstractedly at the moon, " have the power 
to expel melancholy, their services are likely in the 
future to be greatly esteemed. The world, you know, 
is declared to be growing melancholy. Over-civ- 
ilization is making the educated classes everywhere 



MR. BLUFF ON MELANCHOLY. 



207 



despondent and sad. Why should it do so, I won- 
der ? " 

" Is it true," asked Mr. Bluff, " that over-civiliza- 
tion is the cause ? Would wise and worthy civili- 
zation — civilization of the right kind and character 
— increase the melancholy of the world ? " 

" One can not easily say what different condi- 
tions would bring about," replied Oscar, " but civ- 
ilization such as exists seems to be producing great 
weariness of life. It is a disease eating into the 
heart of society. It is intense in Russia, where a 
dreamy melancholy is described by native writers as 
one of the features of cultured circles ; and a similar 
melancholy is said to be spreading over England. 
Some of the magazines are making it a theme for 
discussion, and the poets have fallen into the vein." 

" Poets and romancists," said Mr. Bluff, " have 
always been rather disposed to take despairing views 
of things ; and melancholy, you know, has been 
sometimes cultivated as a fashion. Young Arthur 
in * King John ' exclaims : 

" ' . . . when I was in France, 
Young gentlemen would be as sad as night, 
Only for wantonness.' 

This sort of affectation, however, is as old as hu- 
man nature. Then there is the whimsical egotism 



2o8 BACHELOR BLUFF, 

and selfish bitterness of the Jaques type, a melan- 
choly not unlike that the poets affect, and which 
has been well characterized as ' Wertherism.' Then 
there is the moonlight melancholy which young la- 
dies affect." 

" We do not affect," exclaimed Miranda, with 
spirit, " we really feel it. I believe that all people 
with poetry and tenderness in their nature are sub- 
ject to melancholy moods ; of course, tough old 
bachelors are notoriously without either of those 
qualities." 

" Then, young lady, we are just the physicians to 
prescribe for the complaint." 

" It is not a complaint^t is a poetic ecstasy." 

*' Melancholy ecstasies of the young-lady kind 
are not going to do much harm. But there is a 
spirit of melancholy abroad, as Oscar says, which 
needs sharp treatment in order to effect a cure. 
There are m.any persons who suffer from a constitu- 
tional tendency to melancholy, but the people who 
write about it, who burst into pathetic rhymes, who 
go about mooning over the sadness and misery of 
life, are a set of idle and egotistic dreamers who 
either cultivate melancholy as a supposed sign of 
poetic genius, or who are oppressed with ennui from 
pure idleness, or whose melancholy is simply a reac- 
tion from dissipation. All such fellows should be 



MR. BLUFF ON MELANCHOLY. 209 

well whipped to some honest, wholesome task. A 
few earnest things to do, a little subordination of 
their diseased self-love, some small control over their 
appetites, would send their affectations and their 
whims to the winds." 

" Still, sir," replied Oscar, " I must think there is 
a great deal of genuine sadness in the world." 

" You are right," replied Mr. Bluff. " But is 
this sadness increased by culture and intellectual 
development } Has the world grown graver because 
it has grown wiser .'* " 

" There is more meditation and study, a higher 
ideal of life, a greater mental strain, and these 
things have combined to produce a peculiar schol- 
arly melancholy. Years ago Emerson found in Eng- 
land numbers of what he called ' silent Greeks,' 
men whose fastidious culture shrank from the col- 
lisions and contests of life, whose over - fastidious- 
ness had paralyzed impulse and ambition, who ad- 
mired nothing and sought for nothing, because 
nothing could come up to the level of their high 
ideals." 

" Still, is it true that sadness is specially the 
product of culture ? " asked Mr. Bluff. " You have 
seen, of course. Millet's pictures of French rustics. 
They are the very incarnation of melancholy. What 
a picture of sullen gloom is that of his ' Sov/er ' — a 



2 10 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

life without hope, without light, bound for ever to 
the wheel of dreary task ! And yet this is an out- 
of-door laborer. We might expect melancholy to 
grow up in the shop amid the ceaseless din of 
machinery, but in primitive, picturesque labor why 
should there not abound the old joyousness ? There 
is less oppression and injustice now : the laborer is 
protected; the fruits of his fields are garnered for 
himself, instead of for priest, king, or robber baron; 
and yet, if we may believe the painter, an intense 
gloom rests upon him. Can it be that, suffering 
less than his ancestors, he yet embodies the accu- 
mulations of sorrow and despair that have been 
borne by his race "i Or is it that, while still as 
lowly as his progenitors, he has caught visions of 
higher and better things, that time has taught him 
to think and compare, to discover all that is with- 
held from him, to see in himself the perpetual drudge 
kept for ever in the dust by the unjust discrimina- 
tions of life? The English rustic, also, has ceased 
to be the merry fellow he was once — foregone all 
his old sports and pastimes, without really gaining 
compensation in education ; but, having in a rude 
way learned to think, he has come into the posses- 
sion of discontent and distrust. It is no wonder 
that gloom should be the heritage of drudges of 
the fields and victims of tasteless labor; but a won- 



MR. BLUFF ON MELANCHOLY. 211 

der, indeed, that education should bring a mildew 
upon the heart and brain of people who have all 
the world before them to choose from and enjoy. 
Can you explain this ? " 

" I confess that I can not." 

" If it is true," continued Mr. Bluff, " it is be- 
cause education is wrong in its methods and ob- 
jects. It would be different, I suspect, if Nature 
were studied more and the artificial sentiments of 
the poets and romancists less. Melancholy often 
comes of brooding and introspection, and hence if 
men were to look abroad rather than within, to 
open their eyes and hearts to the beauties and won- 
ders of meadows and woods, of sky and sea, their 
despondency would be effectually exorcised. It is 
not knowledge simply, but kinds of knowledge, that 
bring gloom and sadness. I have not discovered 
that philosophers, historians, poets, naturalists, men 
of science, or men of intellectual out-of-door pur- 
suits, have any special tendency to melancholy. In- 
deed, the great lights in all literature for the most 
part have been men of serene and happy natures. 
If Dante and Cowper and Dr. Johnson were melan- 
choly men, Shakespeare and Goethe and Scott and 
a vast number of others, eminent in all branches of 
letters, were not. Every form of healthful mental 
occupation brings to the mind joy rather than gloom 



212 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

or sorrow ; and melancholy, excepting for the mo- 
ment all who are constitutionally afflicted with it, so 
far as it is the product at all of intellectualism, is 
the result of unhealthful forms of it. Every strain 
upon the emotions produces a morbid reaction ; and 
this is why certain poets and all writers who force 
themselves . into ecstasies of feeling suffer when the 
mental intoxication is over. Severe occupations that 
employ but do not excite the mind — whether low 
or high in degree — leave no taint of melancholy be- 
hind. It is not those persons who think most, nor 
those who are most keenly alive to the sorrows and 
misfortunes that befall mankind, that are overcome 
by sadness, but commonly the minds that work upon 
their sensibilities and feelings, that cultivate melan- 
choly by the emotions. No doubt all such persons 
have at the beginning a tendency to melancholy, 
but, instead of cultivating cheerfulness, they have 
cultivated disease." 

" They have simply, Mr. Bluff," interrupted Mi- 
randa, "obeyed the impulses of their hearts. I do 
not wonder that poets and men of genius are melan- 
choly, for their exquisite perceptions, their refined 
culture, must make them weary of the comm.on 
things of life." 

" Culture, excellent young lady, ought to chasten 
and enrich our whole being, filling us with Matthew 



MR. BLUFF ON MELANCHOLY. 



213 



Arnold's * sweetness and light.' Is it not odd, now, 
that one prophet should be preaching this benefi- 
cence as the outcome of the right use of the mind, 
while others are deploring the gloom that intellect- 
ualism is casting over the world ? But, in fact, is it 
intellectualism ? Are we not giving that name to 
emotional unrest, self-consciousness, and feverish de- 
sire ? True intellectualism broadens, enlarges, ex- 
alts ; all great, honest, healthful mental training and 
development can do no one harm." 

" But you speak," said Oscar, " of Dr. Johnson's 
melancholy, whose mental occupations were certainly 
of a robust and healthful character." 

" I excepted those who are constitutionally af- 
flicted with melancholy." 

" But are not all people suffering under habitual 
depression of mind simply victims to a constitu- 
tional disorder ? In its extreme phase melancholy 
becomes a form of insanity, and one which physi- 
cians set down as among the most obstinate and 
difficult of cure." 

" I believe," replied Mr. Bluff, " that with all 
truly healthful persons — healthful in mind as well 
as in body — joyousness is the natural, spontaneous, 
inevitable expression of their being. To breathe, to 
move, to live, are in themselves pleasure and hap- 
piness with all well organized persons. There may 



214 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

be trials, sorrows, sufferings, misfortunes, even bitter 
experiences; but, so long as a healthful balance is 
maintained throughout the being, the spirit rebounds 
from these sufferings, and begins to weave hopeful 
promises for the future. No outward circumstance 
determines the cheerfulness or the sadness of men 
— the rich may be sad and the poor cheerful, the 
fortunate may be gloomy and the unfortunate full 
of hope, the sick may be full of the spirit of joy 
and the strong wrapped up in morbid gloom. I 
have heard stalwart fellows deploring in lachrymose 
strains the misery of life in the very presence of 
confirmed invalids whose cheerfulness shed radiance 
upon all within their circle. Some persons are vic- 
tims of dyspepsia, the most joy-killing of all ail- 
ments ; some are victims of diseases that cast shadows 
upon the soul ; some are cursed with a constitutional 
inclination to sadness. The causes are various, but 
every case of melancholy is the product of some 
defect in the organization. Melancholy is the sign 
of disease, and a capacity for cheerfulness hence 
is nothing more than supreme good health — good 
health of mind even more than of body. As a 
disease, then, it should be treated, and every effort 
made to cast it out, just as is made with other 
forms of sickness ; very much, indeed, can be done 
to eradicate it when there is a will to do so. 



MK. BLUFF ON MELANCHOLY 



215 



Cheerfulness ought to be placed among the cardinal 
virtues, and its cultivation made incumbent upon 
every one as a duty." 

" I like cheerfulness well enough," pouted Mi- 
randa ; " but, if you are going to make it a duty, 
then I shall not like it. Duties are never agreeable ; 
it is only when things are pleasures that one cares 
for them." 

" But why has melancholy increased .'' " asked 
Oscar. "Admitting all you say to be true, it does 
not explain why sadness should be affecting the 
race in the way it does." 

" It is due to the increase of sedentary habits 
and the low order of physical health that has come 
therefrom ; to indigestion and other diseases that 
come from neglect of exercise; and additionally to 
a fondness for introspective, subjective study of pas- 
sions, and to the general hot-house atmosphere of 
our emotional literature, to which I referred before. 
I half suspect, however, that dyspepsia is the most 
active cause — or, rather, dyspepsia comes from the 
other causes, and melancholy from it. Nothing so 
clouds the mind and affects the spirits as this dis- 
order. Only recently I heard of an instance of one 
who had been for many years a victim to dyspep- 
sia, and suffered in consequence from the gloom 
and depression that accompanied it. But the time 



2i6 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

came when this illness passed off, and eventually he 
became a sufferer from gout. But great was the 
change. His spirits rose with the pain ; his cheer- 
fulness became proverbial." 

" Must I get the gout, sir," asked Oscar, " in 
order to be rid of melancholy ? " 

" Good, sharp suffering would cure you, I am 
sure ; or any severe duty, or high purpose, or great 
responsibility. Even men constitutionally disposed 
to melancholy are likely to be cured by some form 
of heroic treatment. In one way or another get a 
cheerful habit of mind, and one good thing to this 
end is a cheerful and robust literature. Matthew Ar- 
nold tells us of the extraordinary power with which 
Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, and 
the joy offered to us in the simple elementary affec- 
tions and duties. Here is a supreme test of the 
worth of all poetry, of all literature of the imagina- 
tion, and of all art. There is really no reason for 
the existence of anything within the scope desig- 
nated that does not fill the heart with joy, that does 
not counteract the whole array of evils that make 
melancholy. I do not hesitate to make this asser- 
tion, hard and uncompromising as it may seem. 
Carried into effect, such an edict would sweep out 
of existence some very beautiful fables, no doubt, 
but, as our sympathy for the sad fate of the Lean- 



MK. BLUFF ON MELANCHOLY. 



217 



ders and Romeos of story is really born of our pre- 
vious joy in their being, we need not deprive the 
world of imagination of these pathetic legends. But 
romance and poetry and art that do not awaken in 
us thrills of pleasure, that do not deepen our de- 
light in the world and in mankind, that do not af- 
ford us sweet morsels for meditation and appropria- 
tion, should be shut out from the light altogether 
— thrust back into the domains of darkness and un- 
healthful passion whence they came. What other 
possible mission should poetry and the arts have 
than to increase the happiness of mankind ? If 
they fail to do this, if they cause unrest rather than 
rest, pain rather than delight, disease rather than 
health, they are simply an enemy of the race. I re- 
alize very well the sweetness of a sad strain in mu- 
sic and the righteous sympathy that sorrow awakens ; 
these are things that soften and subdue our grosser 
passions and fill up the measure of our being, but 
they are quite different from the gloom in which 
melancholy people are enshrouded, which is com- 
monly selfish rather than sympathetic, full of bitter- 
ness rather than sweetness. But, however this may 
be, inasmuch as happiness is the legitimate end of 
existence, the sole thing that makes it desirable or 
endurable, the worth of everything is determinable 
by its contribution to this end, and by this test alone 
10 



2i8 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

should knowledge, progress, culture, literature, art, be 
measured." 

"Well," muttered Miranda, as she wrapped her- 
self closely in a shawl, and turned her eyes to the 
moon, " the sermon has been a long one. All the 
same, I like melancholy poetry, and melancholy mu- 
sic, and melancholy moonlight." 



XIV. 



MR. BLUFF ON MORALS IN LITERATURE 
AND NUDITY IN ART. 

{Over Wine and Walmcfs.) 

Bachelor Bluff, 
Mr. Quiver. 

Quiver {poet, novelist, essayist, translator of Baude- 
laire, and disciple of Swinbu7'ne). We claim for our art, 
sir, the privilege of covering the whole field of hu- 
man thought, feeling, and experience. No literature, 
sir, is a great literature that does not sound the 
depths of woe and reach the heights of ecstasy — that 
does not reflect human sufferings and express human 
aspirations, and embody all that men and women feel 
and enjoy, endure and hope. The exclusion of pas- 
sions because they are wrong passions, or of acts be- 
cause they are criminal acts, is simply to emasculate 
literature. 

Bluff {energetically). That is to say, that while in 
life and society, and in all forms of intercourse be- 
tween men, some things are forbidden, literature is 



2 20 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

privileged to descant upon everything and uncover 
everything — that it has no sacred reserves, that it is 
bound by no discrimination between clean and un- 
clean, that it is just as much its province to excite 
wrong as it is to stimulate rightful emotions. 

Quiver. The only morals, sir, that art is concerned 
with is fidelity to one's own perceptions, and faith- 
fulness to artistic truth. This form of morality we 
enforce. The worker who surrenders his convictions 
to popular clamor, or who descends from a pure art- 
ideal to an inferior standard in order to win the ap- 
preciation of the multitude, is, in our judgment, im- 
moral. It is wholly a question of fidelity to what 
one feels and sees. 

Bluff. It is supremely, sir, a question of good to 
mankind. Artists and poets must be honest, but 
there is nothing to prevent them from being also 
discreet ; and it is not a law of honesty that every- 
thing must be said. Art has the whole broad field 
of life and nature before it, but its duty in this wide 
area is to select. The question of morals may be so 
far eliminated that beauty may be the exclusive aim 
of art ; its purpose may be rightfully limited to the 
production of pleasurable sensations. It is true that 
a well-painted landscape, or a piece of elevated, har- 
monious verse, or a fine statue, or a noble piece of 
architecture, has each that subtile morality which all 



MORALS IN LITERATURE, ETC. 221 

things possess that lift up the imagination and fill us 
with the sense of beauty. But all these things are 
without distinct ethical purpose, and art generally 
may be similarly freed from any primary necessity of 
morals — that is, it may be wholly aesthetic in its in- 
spiration and in its aim. But it is not privileged, 
sir^ on the other hand, to be mmoral, directly or by 
implication. Its business is to select, to discover 
and portray the beautiful, the elevated, the ennobling, 
the pleasurable ; to stir the emotions of pity and 
sympathy, to excite admiration and emulation, to en- 
large the boundary of experience and sensation ; but 
it is not its function to deal with the repulsive and 
horrible, to act upon morbid and unhealthful pas- 
sions, to excite contempt for sacred or rightful things, 
to appeal to gross or sensual appetites, to deal with 
the foul and diseased things of life. Hov»^ever stren- 
uous an upholder of the largeness and freedom of 
art you may be, you must see that it is under obli- 
gation to select, to exclude, to separate the fit from 
the unfit. 

Quiver. Yes ; but wholly on artistic grounds. 
There are limitations and reserves, but the artist, 
and not the moralist, knows accurately what these 
are. The artist excludes the gross, the barbaric, the 
crude, and the physically repulsive ; but everything 
that takes place in the heart of man is his. One 



22 2 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

difficulty which we encounter in this country is the 
notion that literature should not treat of subjects of 
which the young and innocent should be kept in 
ignorance. This is absurd. Books are written for 
men and women, and not for green boys and girls. 
The American public in this matter is as feeble and 
squeamish as a prudish old maid. 

Bluff. The American public, sir, is, in fact, the 
least squeamish public of any. 

Quiver. You astonish me when you say that ! 

Bluff. Nevertheless it is true, and I will prove it. 
The example of France is constantly held up by your 
school, where pictorial art is pagan in its devotion 
to the nude, and literature wholly free in the selec- 
tion of its themes and in its treatment of them. 
And yet the French public in one way is very 
squeamish : it permits its authors to touch upon 
every subject, but then it banishes their writings 
out-of-doors. The novel there, for instance, scarcely 
enters respectable families at all ; no young girl is 
permitted access to it, and even elders in the more 
serious classes will not touch it. It is the same 
with the theatre, from which young women particu- 
larly are excluded on account of the themes taken 
up by the dramatists. In France a young woman 
is watched over at every step ; not a book is placed 
in her hands that is not first examined ; not a soul 



MORALS IN LITERATURE, ETC. 223 

is permitted to breathe a word in her ear upon 
any topic without the knowledge of her guardians. 
She knows neither literature, nor art, nor the world ; 
she is educated under the most exacting and watch- 
ful " squeamishness " possible. With us, on the con- 
trary, the novel, and the magazines with their many 
stories, enter every house, they lie on every cen- 
ter-table, they are as accessible to the girl of six- 
teen as to the man of sixty, and the majority of 
their readers is composed of the female sex. We 
throw open our libraries to every class ; we teach 
our children to be readers ; we cover our library- 
tables in confidence with the fresh issues from the 
press, and we discuss freely with our wives, sons, and 
daughters, the qualities of new novels and new po- 
ems. What has followed is just what any wise man 
would have predicted ; for, whenever and wherever 
women become readers, license of speech and many 
themes are driven out of literature. The French 
have as keen a sense of the moral and immoral as 
any people in the world, but they have an extraor- 
dinary notion that ignorance and innocence go to- 
gether, and that as soon as one has learned the nat- 
ure of vice he may be permitted to indulge in his 
salacious tastes at pleasure. The application of this 
theory to women — that matrons being no longer 
ignorant have lost the instincts of innocence and 



2 24 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

modesty — is horrible. But to go back, sir — is not 
the American squeamishness which insists that liter- 
ature shall be pure and accessible to young and old 
alike, far more rational, not to say honorable, than 
that French squeamishness which permits great li- 
cense to its writers, and then reads their produc- 
tions in secret ? This is a confession that there are 
subjects forbidden to art — and this is all American 
squeamishness affirms. 

Quiver. But do not things become proper or im- 
proper according to conditions 1 There are passions 
which the young should not surmise, but of which 
the mature can not be ignorant. 

Bluff. Why should the mature, tell me, inflame 
their imaginations by pictures of these passions 1 
Literature, sir, would be far more sweet and whole- 
some if the darker passions of our kind were alto- 
gether eliminated from it. Those productions, sir, 
are best in every sense which lead us away from 
the heated atmosphere of the emotions ; that either 
fill us with high ideas and lofty principles, or cheer 
us by gay and enlivening pictures of life. And 
specially the whole range of passions and incidents 
growing out of improper or illicit love is unclean, 
and has no rightful place in literature. 

Quiver. But these passions are the most power- 
ful of all the passions, and they afford some of the 



MORALS IN LITERATURE, ETC. 



225 



most thrilling opportunities for an artist's purpose. 
The French dramatists, for instance, believe that the 
heart which yields to temptation and which strug- 
gles to recover its social place by reform and ex- 
emplary conduct appeals to human sympathy with 
an intensity unequaled by any other situation. Or- 
dinary crimes can not supply the conditions needed 
for the dramatist's deep purpose. The offense must 
be one which society declares to be unpardonable. 
It must be one that has arrayed against it the tradi- 
tions and instincts and prestiges of the world. There 
can be no great situation of this kind if the crime 
be of a venial character. The dramatist, therefore, 
seizes upon a woman who has sinned vilely, and 
then essays to show that profound and sustained 
repentance must win and does win the sympathy 
even of those who have proclaimed the moral degra- 
dation of the offense. It is a conflict between the 
stern justice of society and the merciful sympathies 
of the individual that gives to the condemned French 
dramas their great hold upon the public mind. It 
is this conflict, with its vivid contrasts, its effective 
combinations of mingled impulses and feelings, that 
takes such a deep hold upon the dramatic instincts 
of the French playwriters, and gives to their vivid 
invention characters and stories so eminently sus- 
ceptible of intense human passion. It is a bold 



2 26 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

but not an immoral grasp of conditions veined 
through and through with tragic possibilities. It 
is the distinct assertion that an art dealing with 
the human heart must not be excluded from a do- 
main that includes affection, and passion, and re- 
morse, and struggle, and woe, and hope, in their 
widest reach and deepest power. 

Bluff. I can conceive of such a struggle as this 
so presented as to meet nearly all the requirements 
of the purists. Much depends, however, upon the 
fact whether vices are treated really as vices, and 
sins as sins, and not so glozed over as to look half 
like virtues. Let the sympathies be unmistakably 
for the sinner and not for the sin. But while 
plays and books of this kind may possibly be con- 
doned, they do not make great literature ; they do 
not exalt, they do not refine, they do not enrich 
and sweeten, and make happy, the heart of the world. 
They are simply intellectual stimulants — and it is 
because they inflame and excite, because they enlist 
the passions and emotions in full force, that their 
hold upon the multitude is so great. If any pos- 
sible result can come of them it must be in their 
influence as deterrents, and this is not an artistic 
but a moral function — the very thing you denounce. 
For my part, I am inclined not only to condemn 
the passionate literature of the modern French school, 



MORALS IN LITERATURE, ETC. 



227 



but much more besides, even among the world's 
classics. What end is served in any sense, moral 
or artistic, by the jealous furies of Othello or the 
bloody plottings of Macbeth? The mental tribula- 
tions of Hamlet enlist our sympathies and afford 
matter for intellectual study, but how much finer 
and worthier the story would be were there a little 
less killing ! I do not object to tragic emotions 
when associated with high purpose or righteous hu- 
man feeling. The maternal sufferings of Constance 
profoundly m.ove the sympathies and warm the heart, 
but what are the sensations excited by the remorse 
and agony of Phaedre ? We hear a great deal about 
art for art's sake, and sometimes there is art which 
delights us simply as art ; but the moment you touch 
human passion art becomes a vehicle only — it ceases 
to be its own end ; it influences character and con- 
duct, and hence you can no more exclude from it 
questions of morals than you can exclude questions 
of air from considerations of health. But do not 
think that I advocate didactic literature. Far from 
it. The world has been preached to enough — I half 
suspect, indeed, that excessive sermonizing is the rea- 
son why it is so wicked. I view this subject not from 
the attitude of a professional moralist — one who would 
fain make all art and literature a vehicle for enforcing 
moral lessons — but as a man of the world who sees 



228 BACHELOR BLUFF, 

what must inevitably be the influence of a literature 
that trenches upon dangerous themes. I declare that 
to speak upon these themes is to utter too much ; but 
I concede that art and literature are moral enough 
when they avoid topics that are in themselves im- 
moral, their purpose not being didactic. But we 
have in the studios the same cant about morals in 
painting and sculpture, especially as expressed in the 
nude, as we have from the fleshly school of poets 
and romancists. 

Quiver. Do you condemn the delineation of the 
human figure ? I did not suppose you such a Phi- 
listine. 

Bluff. I am a Philistine, or whatever else you 
will, to the extent of refusing to be cheated by rant 
and cant. I claim the human privilege, sir, of ex- 
amining the ground that theories stand upon. I re- 
sent, sir, your application of that word to me. A 
Philistine is one whom artists and poets cover with 
immense scorn ; but what is a Philistine } Anybody 
apparently who does not assent to all the notions 
and wild theories that obtain in the studios and in 
the Bohemian circles of the beer-gardens. To take 
a literary view of art — which means, I believe, to 
judge of a picture by its motive and story rather 
than by its technique — is to be a Philistine; to as- 
sume that art and poetry are not the highest things 



MORALS IN LITERATURE, ETC. 229 

in life is to utter rank Philistinism ; to intimate 
that morality should be a force and a factor in art 
is to show one's self wholly incapable of discerning 
the high purpose of sesthetics, and as a consequence 
to merit being cast into the darkness and dreariness 
of Philistinism for ever. Let me tell you that this 
word Philistinism has become rather too much of a 
bugbear. It is used in altogether too arrogant a 
fashion by art and literary folk ; many people, in- 
deed, seem to be frightened at it, in a very vague 
and apprehensive way — pretty much, I fancy, as the 
market-woman, in the oft-quoted anecdote, burst into 
tears upon being called an hypotenuse. And in 
nothing is the dictum of the studios so arrogant as 
in the question of nudity in art. It is not only 
proper, it is declared, to depict the human figure as 
'' God made it," but he who shrinks from displays 
of this kind, who questions their righteousness, who 
believes or fears that they do not exercise a good 
influence upon the imaginations of impressible peo- 
ple, is not only a Philistine, but a prurient one ; he is 
a person whose carnal tendencies have not been 
chastened and purified in the high atmosphere of 
the Bohemian attic. Now, sir, I am very willing, 
indeed, to accept the opinion of the studios upon 
any mere art question. The judgment of artists as 
to the execution of Page's " Venus," or Powers's 



230 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



" Greek Slave," is entitled to the greatest respect ; 
but as to the effect upon the popular imagination 
of these and similar productions I see no reason 
why I and others are not as good judges as pro- 
fessional men anywhere. And, taking human nature 
as it is, I do not believe that nude art is anything 
but pernicious. "To the pure all things are pure," 
you say ; but we are not pure : we have many very 
powerful passions and evil tendencies; and life and 
society must be so adjusted that these passions and 
tendencies are not unnecessarily strengthened. 

Quiver. The nude human figure, male or female, 
in the judgment of innumerable conscientious and 
excellent persons, is not only a fit subject for art, 
but is the noblest and most elevating of all subjects 
that art can treat. In the language of an English 
writer, to say that " the crown and glory of creation 
is an improper subject for art is to accuse the Cre- 
ator of obscenity." 

Bluff. Then, sir, by a parallel argument, we ac- 
cuse the Creator of obscenity when we cover up his 
handiwork with clothing, and declare it immodest to 
reveal it. We have only, sir, to glance at the past 
of mankind to see that in all ages and in all coun- 
tries the instinct of every people has been to drape 
and conceal the person. Even the rudest savages 
make some slight attempt to cover up their naked- 



MORALS IN LITERATURE, ETC. 



23 



ness, while every race as it emerges from savagery- 
indicates its progress by its multiplication of apparel. 
There is no state of nature in which human beings 
are wholly unconscious of nakedness, animals alone 
enjoying this lofty superiority to evil. That which 
was originally an instinct has been strengthened by 
custom, until clothes have become almost our second 
selves. Hawthorne, being much wearied and even 
disgusted with the excessive nudity in art everywhere 
in Rome, affirmed that in our developed civilization 
we are fairly born with our clothes on. It is certain 
that the human race, civilized or half civilized, is 
now known only in its habiliments. Everywhere men 
and women protect and conceal their bodies and 
limbs, guarding their persons with watchful care as 
something sacred to themselves. There are and have 
been some modifications of this principle, but mod- 
esty has always essentially been looked upon as one 
of the first of the virtues. From the earliest infancy 
this principle is instilled — from childhood every 
rightly trained person is taught to respect, to hold 
apart, to veil this " crown and glory of creation." 
How is it, then, that that which is so reverently cov- 
ered up in actual life may be so fully revealed in 
art 1 How is it that, if 

" The chariest maiden is prodigal enough 
If she unmask her beauty to the moon," 



232 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



that maiden beauty may be unmasked in painting 
and sculpture for all the world to look upon with 
unconsciousness, without a blush, without a suspi- 
cion that it is wrong ? 

Quiver. You are confounding nature and art. 

Bluff. They can not be separated in such a ques- 
tion as this. Instinct and education unite in declar- 
ing that if nudity is inadmissible in life it must be 
inadmissible in all forms of imitation. Every mod- 
est person looks at first, I am convinced, upon nude 
art with shrinking and inward questioning ; and it is 
only by a train of artificial reason, by a suppression 
of instincts and natural impulses, that he teaches 
himself to think it permissible. Civilization has 
made a mystery of the person, whether wisely or 
not, and it is simply impossible for art to uncover 
this mystery without grave consequences. Art, more- 
over, is never content with depicting the female fig- 
ure simply and severely, but idealizes it on the side 
of voluptuous beauty, enriches it with every fascina- 
tion of line and tint, carves it with every elaboration 
of skill, in order that it may appeal distinctly to the 
senses and the emotions. Realistic nude art would 
often be disenchanting enough, but what nude art is 
there that is not purposely made seductive, that is 
not intended to fascinate and allure } It is asserted 
that familiarity with the human figure in art would 



MORALS IN LITERATURE, ETC. 



■33 



deaden sexual impressibility to it ; but this it is not 
easy to prove or deny. Art is prolific and free 
among certain peoples notoriously inflammable ; but, 
while some may believe that nude art has not stim- 
ulated passion in these communities, it is obvious 
that it has not been restrained by making the human 
form familiar. 

Quiver, In some form I admit that nude art may 
be hurtful. The delineation of a nude female fig- 
ure may be just as the artist proposes — either the 
embodiment of innocence, or on the other hand sug- 
gestive in every feature and line of lewdness. 

Bluff. Distinctly lewd statues and paintings, sir, 
commonly furnish their own antidote, for they excite 
nothing but disgust in the mind of every spectator 
not hopelessly depraved. It is the subtile fascinations 
of productions not intentionally lewd that allure and 
stimulate the imagination. 

Quiver. Every person should so educate himself 
as not to be affected in this way. 

Bluff. Here, sir, you concede the whole point at 
issue : the man of the world schools himself to look 
upon all exhibitions of the kind with critical coolness ; 
he holds his susceptibilities well under control ; but 
this fact establishes the truth of all I have said. 
Paintings and statues are not made for men of the 
world, but for the whole race — for susceptible and 



234 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



inflammatory youth as well as for trained connois- 
seurs. Sexual passion is implanted in all healthy 
natures ; and it is in the young a powerful and dan- 
gerous force, which it is necessary to keep under 
subjection, and in order to do this it is wise to avoid 
temptation in every form. It must be remembered — 
what artists, perhaps, do not fully realize — that the 
attitude of cursory observers toward nude art is very 
different from their own. It is declared that it is 
impossible to learn to draw the draped figure accu- 
rately without a knowledge of the conformation be- 
neath. This being true, life-schools are necessary, 
and it is easy to see how pupils at these schools may 
draw from models without falling under the influ- 
ences which nude art exercises in public galleries. 
The artist here is on common ground with the sur- 
geon or physician in many delicate duties, when an 
important and special purpose dominates all other 
ideas. The student is delighted with the admirable 
lines and curves of the human figure ; he is strug- 
gling to master the difficulties of form and expres- 
sion, and hence his attitude is wholly academic. But 
he is in error when he assumes that this academic 
relation to art does or can exist generally among 
laymen. The feelings that a beautiful form excites 
in the artist are certain to be different from those 
which spring up in the breast of the ordinary ob- 



MORALS IN LITERATURE, ETC. 235 

server, who is sure not to be occupied with ques- 
tions of execution or artistic scholarship, but with 
the emotions which take possession of him. 

Quiver. Your sentiments, sir, are calculated to be 
resented by a large class. There are persons even 
who claim for art, in its privilege to display the 
human form in unconcealed dignity and charm, an 
agency of spiritual culture — to open, quoting a writer 
on this theme, " the insight to that mystical unity of 
the spiritual, intellectual, and sensuous elements of 
our nature." 

Bluff. All of which I do not and can not under- 
stand. How spiritual culture is to be furthered by 
sensuous delineations of physical beauty, by the al- 
luring fascinations of Venuses and Junos, it is hard 
to say — but this, of course, is because I am wholly 
carnal-minded. I might point out that Venus, the 
goddess of beauty, is the most frequently chosen 
subject for delineation, and this distinctly because 
she is the ideal of voluptuous female beauty, but I 
would only be scoffed at. And yet it is the fact 
that not one nude work of art in a hundred has any 
thought of spiritual beauty or intellectual beauty, or 
springs from any desire to glorify the human body, 
but all are solely and wholly conceived and executed 
as portraits of physical, sensuous beauty, rarely as 
something ethereal, spiritual, or divine — of which 



236 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

some writers say so much. No, sir, the whole thing 
is obvious enough. The human figure is clothed by 
the necessities of climate as well as by the dictates 
of modesty ; and a mystery thereby is made of the 
body which art can not unfold to curious specula- 
tion without danger. The imagination of youth 
speedily catches fire at the vision of female beauty 
that art reveals ; it finds no fascination in coarse, 
lewd art, but a world of untold and dangerous emo- 
tions in the loveliness that sculptor and painter de- 
light to dwell upon — more distinctly in painting than 
in sculpture, no doubt, the latter being necessarily 
more severe, on account of its lack of color. To 
say that youthful imagination ought not to be sen- 
suously stirred by art of this kind is to require of it 
more than is possible in nature. Such emotions are 
natural, but they are dangerous because they are apt 
to lead to great evil, and consequently the moralists 
are right in deploring all art and literature that tend 
to inflame them. The plain common-sense of the 
world is right in this thing, as it is in many other 
things which philosophers and critics quarrel over. 



XV. 

MR. BLUFF AS A CRITIC ON DRESS. 

{On the Veranda.) 

Miranda, 
Bachelor Bluff. 

" Very charming indeed, Miss Miranda, and very 
picturesque." 

" I am glad you like it," exclaimed Miranda, her 
face flushing with pleasure at the Bachelor's praise 
of her new attire. 

" There is certainly," said Mr. Bluff, *' a very 
noticeable revival of the picturesque in ladies' ap- 
parel. Your Gainsborough hat, now, with its broken, 
artistic sweep, its broad brim that shadows the face so 
charmingly, gives an indescribable piquancy to your 
expression ; and then your gown — is it not a Dolly 
Varden.? — is bewitchingly pert and audacious. Fash- 
ion does not often permit women to be so charm- 
ing." 



238 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

'' I don't see how you can say that, sir. Every 
fashion is charming when it is in vogue." 

" What ! are there no principles of taste, no laws 
of combination ? How can putting a thing in vogue 
make it handsome, or putting it out of vogue make 
it unhandsome ? " 

" But just see, sir, how ugly old fashions seem 
to us now ; they didn't look so queer and outlandish 
when they were the style." 

" Nevertheless, they must in fact have been just 
as queer and outlandish. Use familiarized us to 
them; and use has doubtless the power to blind us 
to deformity by gradually deadening our sensibilities. 
A truly good * style,' as you call it, can never appear 
v>^orse than what it is. The real test of the beauty 
of a costume is its effect upon us when it is not in 
fashion. No truly good costume, no dress built up 
upon correct artistic principles, can possibly do any- 
thing else than affect us pleasantly, first and last. 
Greek drapery, a Corinthian capital, or a Greek 
statue, fills us with delight ahvays. The measure 
of our pleasure will increase as our knowledge en- 
larges and our tastes become refined, but pure beauty 
never has to vindicate itself; it compels admiration 
in all countries and in all ages. A person often 
appears ridiculous when dressed up in old bygone 
toggery, but this is never the case vv^hen the toggery 



MR. BLUFF ASA CRITIC ON DRESS. 



239 



is of really good character. We may laugh at a 
young girl disguised as Aunt Hannah, with pillow- 
sleeves, a * poke ' bonnet, and her waist at her arm- 
pits; but we could find nothing to laugh at if the 
same young girl should appear before us costumed 
as a Greek vestal. It is not time, nor age, nor 
familiarity, young lady, that makes a given style of 
dress ugly or handsome, but the presence or absence 
of art principles." 

" Really, Mr. Bluff, you are not pretending to 
know anything about ladies' dresses ! " 

" A very little ; but one may get an idea or two 
by making comparisons. But am I not right.? Did 
you ever turn over a book of costumes, and observe 
the succession of frightful fashions that have been 
in vogue at different times .-^ and have you not quickly 
seen the reason why they are frightful — that it is 
because fantastic caprice and not laws of taste have 
governed them } Do you know that in the serious 
drama it would be simply impossible in many cases 
for an actress to appear before a modern audience 
dressed with absolute historic accuracy.? This can 
be done commonly in cases where queenly robes are 
worn ; in almost all other instances a costume strictly 
correct would excite the risibilities of the spectators, 
and turn the tragedy into a comedy. Imagine a seri- 
ous play of the time of the First Empire, with the 



240 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



heroine in scant skirts, just reaching to her boot-tops, 
with her waist under her arm-pits, and a coiffure 
towering to the skies ! Such a heroine might be 
very amusing in an eccentric comedy, but would 
appear ridiculous in exhibitions of intense feeling. 
No actress in the world dares to costume herself 
in all her parts with historic accuracy ; she is com- 
pelled to modify, and adapt, and as far as pos- 
sible introduce changes based on correct princi- 
ples." 

" How strange it is," said Miranda, " that often, 
when we see old portraits of women celebrated in 
their time for their beauty, it is impossible to see 
any beauty at all ! They just look horrible, with 
their frightful head - dresses, and queer laces, and 
otttre gowns." 

" Those old ugly fashions lost, no doubt, much of 
their ugliness through familiarity, but women some- 
times succeeded in maintaining grace and beauty 
despite the extraordinary pains that were taken to 
extinguish those qualities. The native charms of 
the wearer, the flashing eye, the rising color of the 
cheek, the dazzling smile, the fascination of manner 
and voice — things which disappear from the painted 
image — all these were there to charm, to captivate, 
and to partially overcome the great drawback of a 
preposterous get-up — to use a phrase of the green- 



MR. BLUFF AS A CRITIC ON DRESS. 241 

room. It must have been some hideous style in 
vogue at the time that prompted the poet to declare 
that lovely woman unadorned is adorned the most. 
In all ages men have made their vehement protests 
against the ugly and fantastic decrees of fashion, 
but in all ages men, notwithstanding the deformities 
of mistaken art, have admired the loveliness of 
women so far as it has survived devices to obliter- 
ate it." 

" What would you have us do, Mr. Bluff, in 
order to prevent ugly styles coming into fash- 
ion .? " 

" Do not surrender yourself so unreservedly to 
every new device of the mantua-makers, and learn 
a few elementary principles of taste. You study a 
little the harmonies of colors, but you give no heed 
to the principles of lines and proportion. Nature 
understood her business when she placed the waist 
of the human figure where it is ; but tailors and 
modistes are continually trying to make a new law 
of proportion — at one time by thrusting the waist 
half-way up to the shoulders, at another by extend- 
ing it down over the hips — and you ignorantly per- 
mit them to play these tricks without rebuke or 
reproach. It is impossible for a hat to look be- 
coming and graceful if it does not follow the lines 
of the head, and throw the face partly in shadow. 
11 



242 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



But you wear your hat at one time perched on your 
nose, at another on the back of your neck, at another 
you set it up on a mountain of hair. In all these 
things you evince no sense of fitness, of harmony of 
form, of the law of subordination of parts. You 
want everything equally conspicuous. One of the 
greatest defects in your attire is an excess of trim- 
ming — a taste which in its origin is purely barbaric. 
Why do you hang ribbons, and flowers, and bugles, 
and laces, and trinkets, and gewgaws of endless 
kinds all over your gowns ? All this is abominable, 
and most offensive to an instructed eye. A fresh, 
natural flower in your hair or at your waist is ex- 
quisite ; but a great array of artificial flowers in your 
bonnet, at your neck, running up and down your 
gowns, is something that certainly is not pleasing, 
nor artistic, nor becoming, nor even civilized. An 
over-trimmed garment is fussy and frivolous ; it lacks 
dignity ; it has no repose ; it gives no sense of 
beauty ; it is petty, paltry, senseless, meaningless, and 
vulgar. A woman's drapery should be rich and 
quiet ; it should fall in ample, graceful folds ; it 
should depend for its beauty on the material and the 
color, and not on foreign ornaments crowded upon it. 
The art and the beauty of simplicity ladies either 
do not understand, or else they permit themselves 
to be ruled absolutely at the dictation of their 



MR. BLUFF AS A CRITIC OiV DRESS. 243 

vwdistcs. But perhaps it is fortunate that they do 
blunder in this way." 

'^ How so ? " 

*' If lovely woman knew perfectly well how to 
adorn herself, how to heighten her beauty, how to set 
off her charms to their best advantage, it would go 
hard with the men. It is difiicult, as it is, to resist 
the fascinations of your sex ; if, then, you should 
bring in perfect art to your aid ; if your toilets were 
always perfect studies, the whole masculine world 
would be at your feet : there is no heart so obdurate 
that it could resist you." 

"You are satirical, sir." 

" No, upon my honor, I am not." 

" You do not speak of the want of taste in men's 
apparel. You certainly do not think your sex supe- 
rior to ours in this particular." 

" Men are not expected to have taste. The styles 
worn by them have often been abominable enough, 
but we must really yield to your sex the palm for in- 
genious ugliness in the way of attire. But tailors as 
well as modistes rule. The classical model of manly 
beauty requires broad shoulders and narrow hips, 
and yet the time has been when fashion dogmatically 
declared that the coats of men should be padded at 
the hips and the lines converge at the neck. Men's 
coats do not narrow at the shoulder now, but they 



244 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

are commonly made wide at the hip, in direct viola- 
tion of the fundamental law. And then see how our 
hatters continually make hat-brims at right angles 
with the face ! Nature never makes a right angle, 
abhors right angles, but hatters set up a law to 
themselves, and continue to make themselves and 
others believe that a stiff, uncurved line around the 
head is the right thing." 

" I wonder why men care for such things.? " said 
Miranda. " No one likes to see a handsomely 
dressed man. It is foppish and unmanly." 

" And yet, by the laws of Nature, men should be 
adorned and decorated instead of women." 

" What next ? Be so good as to explain this 
notion." 

" Is it not true that nearly all through the animal 
species the male is more splendid than the female ? 
The barn-yard cock struts in brilliant crest and 
feathers, while the hen, in more quiet tints, moves 
about demure, simple, modest, content to act its lit- 
tle domestic part, and leave pomp and beauty to its 
master. The peacock's beauty and vanity are noto- 
rious ; and how marked they are beside the quiet, 
gray peahen ! The marvelous plumage of the bird- 
of-paradise adorns the male alone ; the stag tosses 
his superb antlers proudly in the air, while the 
doe stands modest and shrinking at his side ; the 



MR. BLUFF AS A CRITIC ON DRESS. 245 

majestic mane of the lion belongs only to the 
masculine sex. In some cases the difference be- 
tween the male and the female is very slight, but, 
whenever there is a difference, it is invariably, I 
believe, in favor of the male. In man the beard 
supplies the natural distinction seen in almost every 
species." 

*' Are you going to argue, Mr. Bluff," asked Mi- 
randa, with great disdain, *' that it is the province of 
man to wear splendid colors } " 

" I am only asking how it is that in the human 
species all this adornment and splendor have been 
transferred to the female 1 How is it that art has 
been permitted to step in, and seemingly to reverse 
a principle of creation } " 

" I am sure I do not know," said Miranda. 

" Let us see if we can not discover the reason. 
The distinction between the sexes that we are con- 
sidering is largely due, according to Darwin, to the 
admiration of the female animal for beauty of color 
and splendor of form. The female bird, for instance, 
usually so gray and quiet of feather, so modest and 
simple in its own demeanor, is delighted with the 
bright crests and brilliant plumes of its male attend- 
ants, and selects for its mate among its admirers 
him of the gayest feather. While the male is the 
most brilliantly adorned, it is the female, observe, for 



246 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

whom this adornment exists — it is the female whose 
eye is pleased, whose instincts are gratified in the 
beauty of its mate. Do you see where this argu- 
ment will lead us ? Women, who adorn themselves 
in such splendid robes, who exhibit such keen ap- 
preciation of color and ornament and beauty, are 
simply transferring to their own persons those quali- 
ties for which they primarily have an intense admi- 
ration, but which in Nature are displayed for the 
delight of females in individuals of the opposite sex. 
It is something of a usurpation on your part, it must 
be confessed, this decking yourselves for your own 
admiration, but our sex has, very generally, cheerfully 
surrendered to you this privilege. Perhaps you will 
say that, as males have ceased to be handsome and 
brilliant, your natural tastes must have some sort of 
vent ; that, not having a chance to admire the pict- 
uresque in men, you must produce it in yourselves 
for your own gratification. Satisfy your conscience in 
any way you can ; the argument, at least, shows that 
you came naturally by your love of gay apparel, and 
that is something." 

" If we come naturally by it," said Miranda, "we 
are the best judges of it ; we have the instinct, the 
inborn taste, the natural rightful perceptions ; and 
you have only a set of crabbed, perverse, cold-blood- 
ed notions." 



i7/A'. BLUFF AS A CRITIC ON DRESS. 247 

" But, in Nature, colors are never mixed inharmo- 
niously, and there are fitness and purpose in every- 
thing. As your tastes come from Nature, study Nat- 
ure so as to get at her ways of doing things, and 
then you will silence criticism, and win unqualified 
admiration from us all. There has been an immense 
improvement in recent years in home art ; many 
books have been written to aid people in decorating 
their walls and selecting their furniture ; artists of 
repute even have not thought it beneath them to 
design wall-papers and cabinet-ware ; but no apostle 
has arisen in the name of artistic dress. It is true 
that we hear of some attempts in London to revive 
Greek drapery for women, and there is a clique 
known by the newly coined vvord ' aesthetes,' that af- 
fect mediseval eccentricities in dress and ecstatic ec- 
centricities in manner ; but I am not aware of any 
distinct attention, wise or unwise, being given to the 
subject here. In fact, artists, so far from concerning 
themselves about dress, are perhaps the worst-dressed 
men in the community — or, if they do consider dress, 
they put on a general air of dilapidation, as if slov- 
enliness and disorder are indispensable to the pictu- 
resque. But let men be ill dressed if they will, it is 
woman that all men delight in seeing beautifully 
garbed. Dress richly, dress with splendor, dress with 
every device that v/ill enhance your beauty, but 



248 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

remember my injunction, that really good dressing 
must be founded on artistic principles, and not on 
caprice." 

" I would rather be out of the world," exclaimed 
Miranda, with spirit, " than out of fashion." 



XVI. 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 

{Af the Club.) 

[Upon a summer evening, Bachelor Bluff sat at 
the club by an open window, lingering over a claret- 
cup, and chatting with three or four who had 
gathered around him. The conversation was very- 
discursive, wandering hither and thither, touching 
upon many themes, and falling into different moods. 
It lasted into the small hours of the morning, the 
stillness of the street and the growing coolness 
seeming to exercise a pleasing spell upon the gar- 
rulous talker and his listeners. The Chronicler 
gathered up a few fragments of the varied discus- 
sion, which are here presented.] 

" Great thinkers! Philosophers, men of 



science, economists, jurists, are often great thinkers, 
but poets and men of letters rarely. Poets deal 
with sentiments and images, and essayists are com- 



250 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



monly nothing more than rhetoricians. What is 
great thinking? It is separating complex phenomena 
and discovering the truth that underlies them. A 
man is not a great thinker because he is master of 
a picturesque and stirring literary style, or because 
he has something original and striking to say about 
many subjects, or because he has unusual power of 
presentation. Great thinking means penetrative and 
accurate thinking, thinking that establishes truths 
and fixes principles, that solves problems, that en- 
ables us to understand ourselves and thereby to 
adjust our relations to things around us, that sepa- 
rates fact from speculation and error from falsehood. 
Great thinkers, you see, are few by this rule ; and 
your Carlyles, Hugos, and Emersons, who are con- 
tinually held up as thinkers, are far from being 
really such. They are simply men with a notable 
capacity for uttering sounding generalities — and gen- 
eralities that are as often sophistries as anything else. 
Carlyle, with whose name the world has lately been 
ringing, was a phrase-maker, and very much more 
concerned with the effect of what he said than with 
the truth of what he said." 

" I really must challenge you there," said a lis- 
tener. " Carlyle, I should say, was preeminently a 
lover of truth." 

" He had a great disdain for falsehood, and he 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 251 

admired sturdy self-assertion ; but that nice sense 
which strives to analyze accurately and express with 
careful precision, he did not possess. He indulged 
to great excess in the artist's exaggeration : he is the 
rhetorician always, first and last. He possessed a 
copious and unique vocabulary; his sentences are 
quaint, rugged, and eminently picturesque; he has a 
grim humor that gives a ripe flavor to many passages, 
and a power of trenchant imprecation that is fairly 
unapproachable. These qualities make his writings 
in their way superb. One gets new ways of looking 
at familiar things, he is entertained by striking and 
admirable utterances, his ear tingles with a splendid 
but barbaric resonance ; and all this turbulence, 
these bustling and strangely discordant sentences, 
this rude force and grotesque decoration, this pro- 
fusion of strange ideas and stranger words, all seem 
no doubt indeed very like wonderful thinking. But 
what ideas has he given to the world 1 He is a 
fierce denouncer of shams, and a passionate lover 
of force. He admires earnest truthfulness, the spirit 
of loyalty, and self-abnegation. He storms at ve- 
nality, at feebleness, at selfishness, at pretension, at 
crookedness of all kinds, at all ignoble and demean- 
ing things — but while all this is of good service, 
especially when uttered with authority and force, it 
does not constitute great thinking. A vehement 



252 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

passion for worth and an aptitude for picturesque 
scolding may be rightly entitled to praise, but one 
does not come thereby to understand life and the 
world any better. This temper does not throw light 
on dark places; nor indicate the means whereby the 
evils of society may be abated or reformed ; nor aid 
us in adjusting conditions, making laws, or admin- 
istering affairs. The unhappy world that from the 
beginning has stumbled on through slough and mo- 
rass, hoping for and struggling toward the light, 
must go on in its desperate endeavor, utterly un- 
aided by anything that Carlyle did or said. Did I 
say unaided.'* Will it not rather have been ob- 
structed and defeated ? It has gathered some com- 
fort from a voice that has sounded for honesty and 
uprightness, but for the most part this voice has 
mocked it ; for Carlyle detested the growth of free- 
dom, clamored for the restoration of force and au- 
thority, preached to men but one virtue, submission 
— his whole philosophy being, roughly, ' Grin and 
bear it.' These are very good words at times, and 
under right circumstances; but who is this thinker, 
this prophet, who can not understand that mankind 
have aspirations and hopes, who comes only to de- 
nounce and never to cheer, who imagines that ser- 
vile submission and not independent effort gives 
greatness to the race } " 



xMR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 



253 



" Yes ! I like a good play, and I like the 

new actors so long as they confine themselves to 
modern plays. A new style of composition has come 
up, and new methods of acting. Our actors have 
lost a good deal and learned a good deal ; and in 
their OAvn particular fashion I accept them cordially. 
In parlor plays, in the realistic emotional drama, in 
the light, sweet comedies of the Robertson school, 
the new people are very agreeable ; they have learned 
how to be colloquial, they have caught the manners 
of society, they know how to be earnest and simple, 
and they have banished from the stage a good many 
of its tricks and affectations. I like them very well, 
indeed; but they must let the old comedy alone — it 
overwhelms them completely. The broad method, 
the rich unction, the audacious effects, the ripe, 
mellow tone, like the impasto of the old painters — 
these are all gone. Two or three old parts linger on 
the stage in the hands of the last representatives of 
the old school, but when these men leave us a distinct 
art will utterly disappear. Even brilliant high com- 
edy is gone. There are no more Mirabels, Young 
Rovers, Charles Surfaces, Benedicks ; the splendid art 
of the old actors in these parts, their captivating 
•gayety, their superb aplomb^ the dazzling rattle of 
their spirits — the world has lost it all. It is a great 
change, and a change that no one can realize who 



254 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



has never seen any of the old personations. The 
new people are very effective in their way ; and I 
suspect the old actors would be as ill at ease in the 
new parlor comedy as their successors are when 
they try to fill out a Sir Anthony Absolute or a 
Dr. Ollapod. But there is one loss that can not be 
compensated for — this is the art of speaking. None 
of the new actors know how to talk. I saw a 
Shakespearean play recently, and there was but one 
man on the stage that knew how to speak a line. 
Anybody can utter the colloquial commonplaces of 
the later comedy, wherein the art is almost wholly in 
what one does^ not in what he says ; but elocution is 
a lost art. It is true, a whole army of elocutionists 
have been let loose upon us; they abound, I sup- 
pose, on the principle that doctors multiply in sickly 
places. But these elocutionists know little of true 
elocution ; they are mimics, dialect - speakers, plat- 
form-actors, face-makers, declaimers, what-not ; but 
of that exquisite art which throws radiance on a 
poetic line, bringing out its complete meaning and 
full expression — this art is guessed at a little, but 
not at all understood. Charlotte Cushman had it; 
Ellen Tree had it marvelously; Edwin Forrest, with 
all his defects, and a disposition to play with syllables, 
was not without it; and Edwin Booth, with all his 
many fine qualities, has it not — for his utterance is 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 255 

monotonous and hard, and lacks the illuminating 
touches that made the old delivery so delightful. 
Well, the art has gone, the army of elocutionists 
to the contrary, as they may ; but I like good act- 
ing of the kind we have very well indeed — yet 
not in Shakespeare, not in the old comedy." 

" Does not the difference between these two 
styles of acting indicate the change that has come 
over the time ? " 

" Undoubtedly. It has been said, when speaking 
of our great-grandfathers, that those who drank port- 
wine thought port-wine. Certainly, a rich, crusty 
flavor — a mellow, broad heartiness — that character- 
ized the last century, has disappeared ; and there is 
substituted instead a very thin, acrid form of human- 
ity, which, to the generous unction of the old time, 
is what claret is to port. The spirit of the old 
comedy was its hearty, almost boisterous, mirth, its 
supreme and untroubled gayety. As distinguished 
from this, the merriest humors of the new comedy 
are partially cynical ; if there is a laugh, it is the 
laugh of satiety, of the d/ase ; or, at best, the mirth 
is that of the philosopher who, discovering the van- 
ity of all things, is merry with a sort of pitiful dis- 
dain. Our latest comedy, moreover, is reticent and 
repressive ; it has the repose of the Vere de Veres ; 
it is nonchalant, indifferent, epicurean. Its motto is 



256 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

''Nil admirari.* Its love-making and its heroism 
are alike both cool and slightly scornful. It re- 
flects accurately certain tendencies of the age ; and, 
just as we find no rollicking mirth, no abounding 
spirits, no ripe and eager zest in the heroes of the 
mock life before the foot-lights, neither do we find 
them in the real life of the men and women around 
us. Mirabel, or Rover, or Doricourt, with their 
huge exhilaration, their glorious spirits, their superb 
animality, are possible only in a past existence and 
a past art. We have all turned speculators and 
thinkers, students and economists. We are indiffer- 
ent to almost everything but the spirit of criticism ; 
we are fastidious, cynical, hypercritical ; we affect 
taste, and yet our manners are as negative as our 
spirits, and we have utterly outgrown the magnifi- 
cent suavity of the old school. We may well some- 
times wish that our modern life could catch a little 
of the warmth and lusty abandon of a hundred years 
ago ; but it can not be. Each age has unchange- 
ably its own characteristics." 

" The gift to see ourselves as others see us ! 



My good sir, that would be an uncomfortable talis- 
man for most of us. Without a little self-delusion 
in this particular, life would scarcely be tolerable. 
No, sir, that is not the gift, despite Mr. Poet Burns, 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 257 

that we need or could well endure ; but, now, if 
some one would endow us with the gift of seeing 
things as other people see them, that would be a 
boon. It would multiply sensations, increase the 
number of our ideas, fairly enlarge the boundaries of 
life. Gentlemen, I am a little in love with my own 
fancy ; I imagine one in possession of the power of 
entering into the intelligence of other people, by the 
aid of some sprite having the faculty of translating 
himself into the identity of each person he meets — 
of coiling himself up, as it were, in the imagination 
of a poet, and seeing with his ravished eyes the 
beauties of the world ; of gliding into the fancies of 
a man of science and penetrating with him the mys- 
teries of nature ; of entering with passionate delight 
into an artist's studies of the hills and woods ; into the 
speculations of statesmen, and seeing how states are 
ruled ; into the schemes of the man of business whose 
projects people the wilderness and reach to the antip- 
odes; into the sports and gay pleasures of youth; into 
a lover's ecstasy ; into an old man's tender recollec- 
tions of pleasures gone by — seeing, briefly, life on all 
its sides, things in all their aspects. This would 
be a better gift than the purse of Fortunatus." 

"Well, sir, as to another World's Fair, why, 



with all my heart; but this time let it be a Fair 



258 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



showing what has not been done, which of all the na- 
tions has shown most skill in the art of not doing. 
Such an exhibition would be something new, and 
likely to do as much good as anything yet of the 
kind, although the world might not be very proud 
of it. An exhibit of how badly a city can be gov- 
erned would be very appropriate, such as a section 
of metropolitan pavement, an example of a neglected 
wharf, a model of an unrepressed dram-shop, an in- 
terior of a splendid gambling palace, a vivid picture 
of a nine-story tenement-house swarming with de- 
graded women and ragged children, a dramatic rep- 
resentation showing how justice is administered in 
police courts. New York, of course, should send 
this contribution, and she would be sure of a medal. 
The General Government might send a specimen of 
how officials are appointed, vv^ith a model of a mis- 
placed consul, and one of a regulation custom-house 
officer. Each political party should send a diagram 
illustrating how the wrong man gets nominated for 
office. The railroad companies should send a first- 
class example of the discomforts of American railway- 
traveling, illustrating passengers suffocated with dust, 
persecuted with pop-corn peddlers, and fastened down 
in narrow, hard, and inquisitorial seats. A model 
of a soiled railway-station would be proper, with to- 
bacco-spitters and peanut-eaters in the waiting-rooms, 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 259 

and dirt and debris heaped around it. Another 
edifying exhibit would be a railway-train crashing 
through a bridge, or tumbling over a cliff. A choice 
specimen of a summer barrack, called a summer ho- 
tel, should be there, with every detail of the annoy- 
ance it implies faithfully depicted. Care would 
need to be taken to represent the average Ameri- 
can highway, the average American suburban villa, 
the crowded American horse-car, the politeness of 
officials everywhere, the urbane car-conductor — But 
I must stop. Do not expect me to give you a 
whole catalogue ; I have said enough for you to see 
that, if rightly carried out, an exhibition on this plan 
would be a great but most uncomfortable success." 

^' What a really magnificent city New York 



might become if the people were only inspired with 
the intense local pride that once animated the citi- 
zens of Athens, of Rome, of Venice, or of the great 
free cities of Germany ! Its situation, in some par- 
ticulars, is wonderfully fine, but, while everybody ac- 
knowledges this fact, it is not fully comprehended. 
That the city lies near the sea, with a splendid bay 
at its foot, and is washed on each side by a noble 
river, is perceived ; but in what way have these facts 
been turned to account } For anything one may see 
as he walks the streets. New York might be an in- 



26o BACHELOR BLUFF. 

land city, standing in an arid plain. The splendid 
waters that surround it bestow no convenience, no 
beauty, no features of health, recreation, or attrac- 
tion. Resting upon an inlet of the sea, it has su- 
perb outlooks, but they are given over to dirt and 
disorder, it being the inscrutable law of cities that 
refuse and loafers shall ever drift down to the wa- 
ter's edge. There is a Battery that commands a bay 
which for beauty is excelled by but one or two in 
the world, and for picturesque animation is une- 
qualed. But the Battery is given over to immigrants, 
who alone enjoy the fresh sea air and the va- 
ried panorama — our citizens, for the most part, turn- 
ing their backs upon it ; and yet what a place for a 
terrace, for a belvedere, for grand baths, for marble 
walks and classic gardens, for some great display of 
architectural beauty ! No city in the world has a 
spot so fitted for the exercise of the architect's or 
gardener's skill. The broad bay, the green hills 
that encompass it, the tossing waters, the anchored 
ships, the swift steamboats that come and go, the im- 
mense stir and life — all make up a fascinating pict- 
ure, but it is surrendered to stragglers and strangers. 
There ought to be erected a lofty tower with a look- 
out, or hanging gardens — some unique architectural 
structure, to which citizens might resort for rest, sea- 
air, and an opportunity to look upon the unsur- 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 261 

passed picture always to be found there. There 
should also be erected baths — I do not mean swim- 
ming-barracks — but structures of marble such as 
would vie with the famous baths of old Rome. And 
then look at the rivers that border the city ! Why 
should the whole stretch of their shores be given 
exclusively to wharves and trade .? Here and there 
an embankment or a belvedere should be erected, 
to which the people could resort on summer days 
and evenings and inhale the fresh air. Were there 
such things in the hearts of the people as a passion 
for art, a taste for the grand, the water boundaries 
of New York would present a succession of noble 
piers for commerce, superb baths for health, splen- 
did belvederes and river-side gardens, such as would 
give grace and beauty to its shores and make the 
city famous. But you are saying to yourselves, * This 
is the dream of a visionary.' Let me tell you that it is 
only by exalted conceptions of the kind that cities 
become great. Neither Babylon nor Rome became 
the wonder of the world save by high ambition and 
lofty local pride. Sloth, indolence, indifference, low 
tastes and desires, never did and never will give 
largeness and dignity to the habitations of men." 

" How great is the stir and commotion of 



the times ! The many-sided elements that make up 



262 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

our population remind me at times of that vivid 
era in ancient history when Italians and Greeks, 
Egyptians and Jews, Goths and Germans, Numidi- 
ans and Britons, Christians and pagans, were united 
under the dominion of the Roman eagle — when from 
the Atlantic to the Euphrates, from Sahara to the 
forests of Germany, turbulent and active millions of 
widely different nationalities and habits jostled each 
other in half-amicable contention, and filled the world 
with the stir and bustle of their doings. In America 
w^e have now as varied nationalities and as contrast- 
ed social elements. The four quarters of the globe 
are with us cheek by jowl ; Africans and Mongoli- 
ans, Teutons and Celts, Gauls and Saxons, Jews and 
Egyptians, Indians and Asiatics, Slavs and Italians 
— people of all nationalities unite under the aegis 
of our flag, vastly heterogeneous under our freedom 
for individual development, but swiftly acquiring 
a measure of homogeneity by reason of liberalizing 
intercourse. These national diversities are supple- 
mented by local diversities, and these again 'are va- 
ried by the perfect opportunity for individual action ; 
and so everywhere we see strange differences and 
yet unity — the struggle and friction of elements that 
by nature oppose and contend, and which yet by 
law and national pressure are abraded into certain 
unities of purpose. All these contrasted and con- 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 263 

tending features produce throughout the country a 
picturesque turbulence that recalls the commotion 
of Rome, Constantinople, or Alexandria. The po- 
litical liberty which brings all sorts of people from 
foreign shores is attended by that social liberty 
which gives license to all sorts of individual caprice, 
and as a result v/e have a life full of contrast, activ- 
ity, and collision — a life exuberant, loud, and expan- 
sive, which may possibly lack claim to high refine- 
ment, but which yet compensates for this by its 
lustiness, its courage, and its achievements. In all 
our great cities these elements are notably conspicu- 
ous ; but New York especially seems in a perpetual 
flutter of exuberant life. There are here ceaseless 
outbursts of the elements that make up its popula- 
tion, constantly the loudest demonstration of differ- 
ent organizations, nationalities, or modes of thought, 
while in pleasure as well as in business we are fairly 
stunned with the excess of confused activity. The 
Germans flaunt their banners and utter their paeans 
of triumph to-day ; the Irish fill our streets with 
rude pageantries to-morrow ; and all peoples in 
some form express their national feelings. The 
drama and opera of every tongue have representa- 
tives ; the sports of all climes are reproduced in our 
pleasure-grounds ; and, in our own individual way, 
we break out into clamorous conviviality. ?Iow ex- 



264 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

travagantly we dine and lavishly we drink, the ho- 
tels bear witness ; what bustle and excitement of 
pleasure we delight in, our seashore resorts give 
evidence. A certain emphasis in our enjoyments is 
one of our developing characteristics. In Wall 
Street our business is enacted amid the clatter of 
champagne-glasses ; on the roads our soberest men 
of trade repeat the excitement of the race-course. 
Our hotels are marvelous caravansaries ; our prome- 
nades glory in their processions of gay costumes. 
In all things there are emphasis and noise. We 
repeat the hot, tumultuous life of Rome when the 
Roman Empire had gathered all peoples under her 
dominion, and marked her boundaries almost by 
the limits of civilization." 

" Logically women are entitled to the suf- 



frage, whether suffrage be either a right or a privi- 
lege. If it is a right, one half of the community 
possesses it equally with the other half; if it is a 
privilege, who bestows it — from what is it derived "i 
As matters stand, one part of the community gives 
it to itself, which is a little presumptuous, to say the 
least. Nevertheless, we must, in self-defense, keep 
the suffrage from women as long as possible. The 
female sex outnumber us in all the Atlantic States 
considerably now, and the difference increases ; if 



MR 



BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 265 



we, therefore, allow women to exercise the elective 
franchise, there is danger that, instead of making 
them our political equals, they would become our 
political superiors; they would outvote us at the 
polls, and we should find them combining to secure 
their own legislators. They would elect themselves 
to all the places of profit and honor; they would 
retaliate for centuries of unfavorable legislation on 
our part ; they would shut up our clubs, make 
smoking a penal offense, tax bachelors out of ex- 
istence, and do innumerable things to enslave us. 
The only way to escape this dire result is to restore 
at once the balance of the sexes. How to do it is 
perplexing ; but the supremacy of man, the welfare 
and security of time-honored institutions, all the 
interests of society, as we understand them, render 
its accomplishment necessary. The excess is some 
one hundred and thirty thousand, I believe ; and to 
dispose of this number is a problem that might well 
tax the ingenuity of the most adroit statesmanship. 
To put so large a number under restraint would be 
impossible with the present penitentiary accommo- 
dations, and the cost, moreover, would be alarming. 
It wouldn't do to put them to the sword — such a 
solution two thousand years ago would have been 
the most obvious method of cutting the Gordian 
knot ; but in this sentimental era we have qualms 
12 



266 BACHELOR BLUFF, 

and prejudices. The Herod plan applied to all fe- 
male infants would in time accomplish the result ; 
and Swift's suggestion in regard to Irish infants 
would also bring about the desired equilibrium, 
and at the same time utilize the surplus — but 
baked female baby is not yet one of our recognized 
dishes. Can any one show us the way out of this 
difficulty ? " 

" Radicalism and Conservatism, instead of 



being really antagonistical, are simply supplemental. 
The Radical, for instance, discovers that without 
progressive thought the world would stagnate. He 
perceives with great clearness how much has been 
accomplished in every direction — in opinion, in gov- 
ernment, in science, in art, in education, in religion, 
in society — by an emancipation from the traditions 
of the past, by bold, speculative thought, and by 
freedom of action. But the Conservative has equal- 
ly truthful perceptions. He sees that the safety of 
society depends upon the maintenance of certain 
checks and safeguards, without which the whole com- 
munity would rush into chaos and anarchy. The 
overthrow of established principles, the substitution 
of everything untried for everything tried, the dis- 
regard of all precedents and all experience, the 
abolition of all subordination and all order — these 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 267 

things, the Conservative clearly realizes, would break 
up the foundations of society, and bring us all to 
revolution and ruin. And doubtless they would. It 
would never do for Radicalism to have its own way 
altogether ; but neither would it do for Conserva- 
tism to hold the world in absolute check. Conserv- 
atism and Radicalism are, in truth, centripetal and 
centrifugal social forces, which balance each other 
and direct the course of the world." 

— — " I confess that I am a dreamer," said the 



Bachelor, falling into a meditative mood — " a lover 
of the Brown Study, in which, as in a mantle, I 
often wrap myself. There is no painful reaction in 
the visions engendered by this harmless day-dream- 
ing, as with those which are stimulated by hasheesh 
or lotus-eating. There are elements of indulgence 
and relaxation in it, it is true, but in this harsh 
world it is strange if we can not permit ourselves 
at least a few idle dreams of happiness, the only 
form in which to many of us it can ever come. 
The Brown Study may be indulged in by an open 
window, by a slow and slumberous fire, " under 
green leaves," by river or lake shore, by the solemn 
surge of the sea, and even amid the stir and bustle 
of busy highways. Its subjects are as various as 
life, and its requirements are simply a surrender 



268 r BACHELOR BLUFF. 

of the whole mind to its wayward and capricious 
courses. All devotees of the Brown Study come 
into large fortunes ; fall rapturously in love with 
tender-hearted women ; achieve great successes in 
art, literature, or commerce ; scatter with princely 
munificence exhaustless wealth ; create rare Utopias ; 
turn labor, skill, genius, application, love, and all hu- 
man sentiments, into triumphant engines of earthly 
bliss. Nature bursts into beauty, and art into pro- 
duction ; the heavens smile and the winds are tem- 
pered ; all that the fancy covets, the senses love, or 
the heart yearns for, spring into form and life at the 
command of this mystic talisman. It deadens pain, 
gilds labor, sweetens care, and fills the soul with 
soft pleasure. It is one of the fine qualities of the 
Brown Study, that its students are endowed with 
charity and good-will. The munificence of their gifts, 
the breadth and comprehensiveness of their largess, 
are noble. In fact, one of the keenest pleasures ex- 
perienced under the influence of this study, is the 
ability which it dreamingly affords of scattering hap- 
piness around, whether the reveries be of wealth, or 
love, or friendship, or success. This alone ought to 
redeem the habit from the charge of idle dreaming. 
A bliss that multiplies itself by wide bestowing, a 
happiness that discovers a most exquisite delight in 
its power to bless, must leave a sweetness in the 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 269 

heart worth all the indulgence and relaxation by 
which it is created. But why has this species of 
dreaming received the somber name of Brown ? Is 
it because it is so often evoked by the brown cigar, 
or the smoke-colored pipe ? Is there something in 
the rapt, lost, far-away look of the dreamer that is 
dun and dim, as if the soul had faded away out of 
the features, and left them blank and empty ? Or 
is it because Brown Studies are more frequent in 
the autumn of life, when all things are sere and 
somber ? Possibly it is because brown is soft and 
mellow, and has rich warm depths of character and 
expression — and yet brown is of the earth, and 
these dreams are tinted with the hues of heaven. 
Brown, indeed, the outward aspect may be ; but a 
delicious dreaming that lights up the soul with 
glorious colors, that fills the imagination with pomp 
and splendor, that converts all things into beauty, 
promise, and delight, should to my notion be enti- 
tled a Golden Study." 

" Natural justice ! There is no such thing. 



If there is natural justice, where and how is it ex- 
hibited ? In what does it exist } In what way, I 
ask, has society supplanted or disregarded it ? In 
Nature, sirs, there is neither justice, nor equity, nor 
equality ; there is but one fundamental principle. 



270 



BACHELOR BLUFF. 



and this is might. Throughout the whole dominion 
of Nature the lesser is ever conquered and absorbed 
by the greater; the weak succumb to the strong, 
the big consume the little ; life in one form is de- 
stroyed to perpetuate life in another form. The 
operations of Nature are harsh and inexorable, with- 
out mercy, without pity, without any sentiment so- 
ever, possessing one sole attribute — that of power. 
The equal right of different individuals to life, lib- 
erty, and happiness, is unknov/n. If we derive our 
ideas of right and wrong from certain implanted 
instincts, we certainly do not find their verification 
in any of the aspects of untamed Nature. Justice 
has no existence save as an intellectual perception 
of cultivated man — it is not a law of Nature, but 
the sublime conception of man. How absurd, then, 
are all these frequent appeals to natural justice ! 
The right term is natural injustice ; and if we look 
closely we will see that this elementary principle is 
continually operating in society; that there is al- 
ways a persistent conflict between natural injustice 
and human justice. As in Nature the big consume 
the little, so in society we find the strong control- 
ling and absorbing the weak, the lesser contributing 
to the fruition of the greater, despite our struggles 
to have it otherwise. As society has advanced, 
things have changed much more in name than in 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS, 271 

fact. Trade is acting in the same way that military 
prowess did once, building up in the hands of the 
few enormous power, virtually derived from the sub- 
ordination of the many : hence now we have Roth- 
schilds and Vanderbilts, instead of Warwicks and 
Percies. The battle of life is between natural ten- 
dencies to power and conquest and human concep- 
tions of right; and, instead of appealing to Nature, 
it must be our purpose to revoke its order, to dis- 
regard its example, if we wish to firmly establish 
the principle of social justice." 

" The age unpoetic and unheroic ! Such 



are current complaints, I know, but are they true ? 
Poetry and heroism change some of their aspects 
from age to age, and it may be that those who la- 
ment their decadence are simply failing to discern 
those virtues under their new guise ; but to my mind 
the age is really neither unpoetic nor unheroic. It 
is unmistakably a pushing, energetic, money-making 
age ; it is distinctly an age where practical and utili- 
tarian things have a very high place in the schemes 
and purposes of the people ; but, notwithstanding all 
these strong practical activities, there is abundant 
evidence that poetry and heroism are great existing 
social forces. The people are eager readers of im- 
aginative literature. They listen not only attentive- 



272 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

ly to the poets and singers of the thue, but they are 
manifesting a marked disposition to go back and 
study periods of the past. There are signs of a 
revival of classic taste, and the early productions of 
literature have now continually increasing hosts of 
students and admirers. While on one hand we see 
that realism in art and literature is cultivated, we 
also note that higher forms of imaginative thought 
lead captive whole ranks of the people. There 
have been more brilliant eras of dramatic and even 
of lyric literature, but none in which the poets 
have enjoyed so large a body of readers, none in 
which they have been permitted so freely to follow 
their individual poetic instincts, or have more effect- 
ually stirred the popular heart. Those who look 
may see evidence of the truth of what I say on 
every hand. The interest felt in every new produc- 
tion by Tennyson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Mor- 
ris, Swinburne ; the endless essays upon poetry and 
the poets in all the magazines — these are substan- 
tiating facts. 

"Art also is inspired with both realistic truth 
and imaginative force. Mere story-telling by pict- 
ures has declined, but the expression of poetic feel- 
ing and sentiment by color and form has taken a 
lofty place. I do not deny that there have been 
greater art-epochs, but there is now a marked pas- 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSFS SUNDRY TOPICS. 273 

sion for studying those epochs ; there is an eager- 
ness to be at home with their spirit and to master 
their teachings. Mere imitations of ancient methods 
are not tolerated, but originality, passion, individual 
sentiment, inventive power, are quickly recognized 
and applauded. This so-called unpoetic age is com- 
pleting in some instances and restoring in others the 
great poetical architecture of earlier ages ; it is 
searching amid the ruins of buried cities for pre- 
cious art-memorials of the past, and placing the dis- 
covered treasures in places of honor ; it is bringing 
into practical use ancient suggestions in decorative 
and ornamental art ; it is, in fact, full of reverence 
for the great achievements of the imagination that 
have come down to it, and is instinct with pleasure 
in the stimulating and often daring productions of 
to-day. The literature about art is swelling cease- 
lessly ; teachers who instruct what and how to ad- 
mire are eagerly listened to ; and everywhere are the 
evidences of how large a place this form of poetic 
feeling holds with us. 

" And heroism no less than poetry takes its place 
in this many-sided era. The loud proclamation and 
noisy defiance of some of the earlier forms of hero- 
ism do not exist ; men now believe it incumbent 
upon them to seek no opportunity for the mere dis- 
play of their gallantry, but also to shrink from no 



274 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

occasion that exacts fortitude or involves self-sacri- 
fice. That is emphatically not an unheroic age that 
with so much zeal dares the wilderness of ice in the 
arctic seas and the wilderness of forest and swamp 
in the heart of Africa ; that delights in conquering 
hitherto inaccessible mountain-peaks ; that penetrates 
everywhere, explores everywhere, and enters into a 
multitude of splendid enterprises. Recent wars 
showed no decline of that physical courage which 
in earlier ages was so worshiped ; and in all the 
ordinary exigencies of life, fortitude, endurance, the 
courage to do and to suffer, evince no lack of the 
true spirit of heroism. You can readily supplement 
many arguments and facts to those I have advanced, 
to show that the age has neither lost imaginative 
sympathy, which is the essential spirit of poetry, nor 
the fiber of genuine heroism." 

"Have you noted the recent marked intru- 
sion of the peasant into art and literature, especially 
French art and literature .^ Democratic theories and 
principles are no new things, but genuine democratic 
sympathies are a development almost of our own 
time ; at least, both art and literature have largely 
held themselves aloof from phases of lowly life. 
France once politically deified the people, but that 
was a spasm of demagogism rather than any genuine 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 275 

sympathy with the lower classes; but to-day there 
are evidences of a new spirit there. A great deal 
of recent French fiction is devoted to the delinea- 
tion and elevation of peasant-life. George Sand, 
during the latter part of her life, gave pictures of 
rustic and the better forms of peasant life in her 
stories almost exclusively. Edmond About gave us 
recently, in ' The Story of an Honest Man,' one of 
the finest pictures of sturdy, lowly life ever penned ; 
Theuriet has written some most delightful sketches 
of provincial and rustic characters, and set upon a 
high place the simple virtues of peasant-life ; and 
many other French writers have caught up the idea. 
But Art, more conspicuously even than Literature, 
has opened its arms to this new thought. The 
painter Millet, a peasant himself, has revealed the 
character, the sorrows, and the struggles of the 
peasant to the world ; he has challenged its critical 
attention and awakened everywhere its sympathies. 
The world has long been familiar with the ideal 
peasant of the ballet, and the romantic peasant of 
the poets, and sometimes caught glimpses in history 
of ignorant, brutal, and starved masses ; but the real 
peasant, just as he is, lowly but human, bent under 
many burdens but not without aspirations, has 
been effectively delineated only in our own age. 
The change that has come over the spirit of art in 



276 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

this particular betokens the general widening of the 
human horizon, the broadening of sympathies, the 
coming of that true democracy that shall make the 
human family all one brotherhood. Even a few 
decades ago art concerned itself almost solely with 
the historic and great. It thirsted for pomp and 
splendor, for great events, for heroes, for ethereal 
beauty, for tragic incidents ; and now it is turning 
from these themes to paint gray skies, uncouth, hum- 
ble figures, the shadow that lies on the path of the 
laborer. This is a change the philosophy of which 
may well be studied." 

" There is something glorious in youth. Its 



follies never trouble me ; I think nothing of its 
ignorance when I see its faith and courage; noth- 
ing of its vanity and conceit when I see its truth, 
its hopeful confidence, its bold aspirations, its pas- 
sion for splendid dreaming. Who would not sur- 
render all the acquisitions that have come with time 
and take up youth with all its greenness and fool- 
ishness, if the Fates offered such a reversion of 
life-leases.? By Jove! there would be a precipitate 
return to the beautiful days, much as we may affect 
to despise them. Wisdom would fling its learning 
down with its gray beard ; Fame would toss its 
crown into the air; Power fling its scepter into the 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 277 

gutter ; Greatness rush with more eagerness down 
the steps of the temple than it ever ascended them ; 
and Wealth sweep its coin aside without a murmur 
— each taking up the fresh, unworn garment of youth, 
and wandering off filled with a rapture known to 
our 'green and salad' days only." 

" There are dull sermons and dull lectures, 



no doubt ; but there is an almost infallible receipt 
for making sermons and lectures interesting." 

" What is that, sir ? " 

" Listen to them. Alert imagination and willing 
sympathy are important factors in giving life and 
meaning to many things that come before us. What 
is wanted in this world more than anything else is 
intelligent appreciation ; for performance in all the 
arts commonly goes beyond the capacity of people 
to understand. To the dull all things are dull. No 
matter what wealth of color an artist pours upon his 
canvas, the picture is meaningless to him who does 
not look upon it with quickened apprehension ; no 
matter with what splendor of imagery a poet adorns 
his lines, it is all a babble to him who has no poesy 
in his soul. Dante and Shakespeare, Raphael and 
Murillo, Beethoven and Handel, all are barren to 
the lethargic, insensible mind. Many a line of a 
poet has profound significance to a student, which 



278 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

is but meaningless jargon to the clown ; many a 
flower is full of beauty to a naturalist that to the 
crude rustic is no more than a worthless weed. As 
it is true that 

" ' The ripe flavor of Falernian tides, 

Not in the wine, but in the taste resides ' ; 

as it is certain that the glowing tints of the flower 
and the radiant splendors of the sunset depend up- 
on the susceptibility of the retina that mirrors them; 
as it is the delicate sensitiveness in the photographic 
plate that catches successfully the shadow of the 
sun, and fixes the subtile lines of the image ; as 
melody can live only in the attuned ear ; as heat 
and light are vital forces only as they act upon the 
material substances that receive them — so we may 
be assured that the world of mind is equally with 
these instances of physical phenomena a matter of 
relation and correspondence. No seeds are so fruit- 
ful that they can quicken in a desert soil, and few 
so feeble that they will not vivify in a generous 
loam. In fault-finding criticism, therefore, it is often 
uncertain where the defect lies — whether it is really 
in the dullness of the producer or in the stubborn 
insensibility of the censor." 

" Fickle Fortune ! It would be good news 



to many people if this were true. There are lucky 



MR. BLUFF DISCUSSES SUNDRY TOPICS. 279 

men to whom Fortune is always faithful, always a 
south wind bringing balm and sweet service ; and 
there are unlucky men to whom she is always 
averse, a perpetual east wind, chilling and killing. 
Fortune and misfortune in this world are distributed 
very much as at a breakfast-table, where all the sugar 
is in one vessel and all the mustard in another." 

*' The millennium is not impossible, and not 



so very difficult. If every man from this time forth 
gave his whole attention to his own sins and vices, 
and ceased to make war on other people's sins and 
vices, we should have it with the new moon." 

— — " A great many people go to church, no 



doubt, to honestly confess their sins, but I am 
afraid that a larger number go to church to con- 
fess their virtues." 

" Great men, it is often said, are only a 



little in advance of the multitude — ^just as hills and 
valleys are alike plunged in darkness at midnight, 
but the dawn lightens the hill-tops first." 

" The cynics will have it that all the world 



is selfish, and every son of Adam occupied solely 
with himself. The absurdity of this notion is evident 



28o BACHELOR BLUFF. 

at a glance — for who has not observed the solicitude 
and concern with which people watch the sins and 
shortcomings of other people ? How anxious they 
are to bring them to repentance, how pained they 
are because they are not as wise and virtuous as 
themselves ! Who ever hears a sermon, that he does 
not generously turn it over to an erring friend ; or a 
wise axiom, that he does not promptly apply it to 
a sinful enemy ? Anxious individuals continually go 
about lamenting the unfortunate habits and weak- 
nesses of their neighbors, and are in such despair 
because of the sins and vices of society, that nothing 
consoles them but the balm of their own virtues." 



XVII. 



MR. BLUFF'S EXPERIENCES OF HOLIDAYS. 

Bachelor Bluff, 
The Chronicler. 

" I HATE holidays," said Bachelor Bluff to me, 
with some little irritation, on a Christmas a few 
years ago. Then he paused an instant, after which 
he resumed: "I don't mean to say that I hate to 
see people enjoying themselves. But I hate holi- 
days, nevertheless, because to me they are always the 
dreariest and saddest days of the year. I shudder 
at the name of holiday. I dread the approach of 
one, and thank Heaven when it is over. I pass 
through, on a holiday, the most horrible sensations, 
the bitterest feelings, the most oppressive melan- 
choly ; in fact, I am not myself at holiday-times." 

"Very strange," I ventured to interpose. 

" A plague on it ! " said he, almost with violence. 
" I'm not inhuman. I don't wish anybody harm. 
I'm glad people can enjoy themselves. But I hate 
holidays all the same. You see, this is the reason: 



282 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

I am a bachelor; I am without kin; I am in a 
place that did not know me at birth. And so, when 
holidays come around, there is no place anywhere 
for me. I have friends, of course ; I don't think 
I've been a very sulky, shut-in, reticent fellow; and 
there is many a board that has a place for me — but 
not at Christmas-time. At Christmas, the dinner is 
a family gathering; and I've no family. There is 
such a gathering of kindred on this occasion, such 
a reunion of family folk, that there is no place for 
a friend, even if the friend be liked. Christmas, 
with all its kindliness and charity and good-will, is, 
after all, deuced selfish. Each little set gathers 
within its own circle; and people like me, with no 
particular circle, are left in the lurch. So you see, 
on the day of all the days in the year that my 
heart pines for good cheer, I'm without an invita- 
tion. 

" Oh, it's because I pine for good cheer," said 
the bachelor, sharply, interrupting my attempt to 
speak, " that I hate holidays. If I were an infer- 
nally selfish fellow, I wouldn't hate holidays. I'd 
go off and have some fun all to myself, somewhere 
or somehow. But, you see, I hate to be in the dark 
when all the rest of the world is in light. I hate 
holidays, because I ought to be merry and happy 
on holidays, and can't. 



MR. BLUFF'S EXPERIENCES OF HOLIDAYS. 283 

" Don't tell me," he cried, stopping the word 
that was on my lips ; " I tell you, I hate holidays. 
The shops look merry, do they, with their bright 
toys and their green branches ? The pantomime is 
crowded with merry hearts, is it? The circus and 
the show are brimful of fun and laughter, are they ? 
Well, they all make me miserable. I haven't any 
pretty-faced girls or bright-eyed boys to take to the 
circus or the show, and all the nice girls and fine 
boys of my acquaintance have their uncles or their 
grand-dads or their cousins to take them to those 
places ; so, if I go, I must go alone. But I don't 
go. I can't bear the chill of seeing everybody happy, 
and knowing myself so lonely and desolate. Con- 
found it, sir, I've too much heart to be happy under 
such circumstances ! I'm too humane, sir ! And the 
result is, I hate holidays. It's miserable to be out, 
and yet I can't stay at home, for I get thinking of 
Christmases past. I can't read — the shadow on my 
heart makes it impossible. I can't walk — for I see 
nothing but pretty pictures through the bright win- 
dows, and happy groups of pleasure-seekers. The 
fact is, I've nothing to do but to hate holidays. — 
But will you not dine with me .? " 

Of course, I had to plead engagement with my 
own family circle, and I couldn't quite invite Mr. 
Bluff home that day, when Cousin Charles and his 



284 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

wife, and Sister Susan and her daughter, and three 
of my wife's kin, had come in from the country, all 
to make a merry Christmas with us. I felt sorry, 
but it was quite impossible ; so I wished Mr. Bluff 
a "merry Christmas," and hurried homeward through 
the cold and nipping air. 

I did not meet Bachelor Bluff again until a week 
after Christmas of the next year, when I learned 
some strange particulars of what occurred to him 
after our parting on the occasion just described. I 
will let Bachelor Bluff tell his adventures for him- 
self: 

"I went to church," said he, "and was as sad 
there as everywhere else. Of course, the evergreens 
were pretty, and the music fine; but all around me 
were happy groups of people, who could scarcely 
keep down merry Christmas long enough to do rev- 
erence to sacred Christmas. And nobody was alone 
but me. Every happy paterfamilias in his pew tan- 
talized me, and the whole atmosphere of the place 
seemed so much better suited to every one else than 
me that I came away hating holidays worse than 
ever. Then I went to the play, and sat down in a 
box all alone by myself. Everybody seemed on the 
best of terms with everybody else, and jokes and 
banter passed from one to another with the most 
good-natured freedom. Everybody but me was in 



J\IK. BLUFF'S EXPERIENCES OF HOLIDAYS. 285 

a little group of friends. I was the only person in 
the whole theatre that was alone. And then there 
was such clapping of hands, and roars of laAighter, 
and shouts of delight at all the fun going on upon 
the stage, all of which was rendered doubly enjoy- 
able by everybody having somebody with whom to 
share and interchange the pleasure, that my loneli- 
ness got simply unbearable, and I hated holidays 
infinitely worse than ever. 

" By five o'clock the holiday became so intoler- 
able that I said I'd go and get a dinner. The 
best dinner the town could provide. A sumptuous 
dinner. A sumptuous dinner for one. A dinner 
with many courses, with wines of the finest brands, 
with bright lights, with a cheerful fire, with every 
condition of comfort — and I'd see if I couldn't for 
once extract a little pleasure out of a holiday ! 

" The handsome dining-room at the club looked 
bright, but it was empty. Who dines at this club 
on Christmas but lonely bachelors ? There was a 
flutter of surprise when I ordered a dinner, and 
the few attendants were, no doubt, glad of some- 
thing to break the monotony of the hours. 

" My dinner was well served. The spacious 
room looked lonely; but the white, snowy cloths, 
the rich window - hangings, the warm tints of the 
walls, the sparkle of the fire in the steel grate, gave 



286 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

the room an air of elegance and cheerfulness; and 
then the table at which I dined was close to the 
window, and through the partly-drawn curtains were 
visible pictures of lonely, cold streets, with bright 
lights from many a window, it is true, but there was 
a storm, and snow began whirling through the street. 
I let my imagination paint the streets as cold and 
dreary as it would, just to extract a little pleasure 
by way of contrast from the brilliant room of which 
I was apparently sole master. 

" I dined well, and recalled in fancy old, youth- 
ful Christmases, and pledged mentally many an old 
friend, and my melancholy was mellowing into a 
low, sad undertone, when, just as I was raising a 
glass of wine to my lips, I was startled by a picture 
at the window-pane. It was a pale, wild, haggard 
face, in a great cloud of black hair, pressed against 
the glass. As I looked, it vanished. With a strange 
thrill at my heart, which my lips mocked with a de- 
risive sneer, I finished the wine and set down the 
glass. It was, of course, only a beggar-girl that had 
crept up to the window and stole a glance at the 
bright scene within; but still the pale face troubled 
me a little, and threw a fresh shadow on my heart. 
I filled my glass once more with wine, and was 
again about to drink, when the face reappeared at 
the window. It was so white, so thin, with eyes so 



MR. BLUFF'S EXPERIFNCES OF HOLIDAYS. 287 

large, wild, and hungry-looking, and the black, un- 
kempt hair, into which the snow had drifted, formed 
so strange and weird a frame to the picture, that I 
was fairly startled. Replacing, untasted, the liquor 
on the table, I rose and went close to the pane. 
The face had vanished, and I could see no object 
within many feet of the window. The storm had 
increased, and the snow was driving in wild gusts 
through the streets, which were empty, save here 
and there a hurrying wayfarer. The whole scene 
was cold, wild, and desolate, and I could not repress 
a keen thrill of sympathy for the child, whoever it 
was, whose only Christmas was to watch, in cold and 
storm, the rich banquet ungratefully enjoyed by the 
lonely bachelor. I resumed my place at the table ; 
but the dinner was finished, and the wine had no 
further relish. I was haunted by the vision at the 
window, and began, with an unreasonable irritation 
at the interruption, to repeat with fresh warmth my 
detestation of holidays. One couldn't even dine 
alone on a holiday with any sort of comfort, I de- 
clared. On holidays one was tormented by too 
much pleasure on one side, and too much misery on 
the other. And then, I said, hunting for justifica- 
tion of my dislike of the day, ' How many other 
people are, like me, made miserable by seeing the 
fullness of enjoyment others possessed ! ' 



288 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

" Oh, yes, I know," sarcastically replied the 
bachelor to a comment of mine ; " of course, all 
magnanimous, generous, and noble-souled people de- 
light in seeing other people made happy, and are 
quite content to accept this vicarious felicity. But 
I, you see, and this dear little girl — " 

" Dear little girl ! " 

" Oh, I forgot," said Bachelor Bluff, blushing a 
little, in spite of a desperate effort not to do so. 
" I didn't tell you. Well, it was so absurd ! I kept 
thinking, thinking of the pale, haggard, lonely little 
girl on the cold and desolate side of the window- 
pane, and the over -fed, discontented, lonely old 
bachelor on the splendid side of the window-pane ; 
and I didn't get much happier thinking about it, I 
can assure you. I drank glass after glass of the 
wine — not that I enjoyed its flavor any more, but 
mechanically, as it were, and with a sort of hope 
thereby to drown unpleasant reminders. I tried to 
attribute my annoyance in the matter to holidays, 
and so denounced them more vehemently than ever. 
I rose once in a while and went to the window, 
but could see no one to whom the pale face could 
have belonged. 

" At last, in no very amiable mood, I got up, put 
on my wrappers, and went out; and the first thing 
I did was to run against r small figure crouching 



iMK. BLUFF'S EXPERIENCFS OF HOLIDAYS. 289 

in the doorway. A face looked up quickly at the 
rough encounter, and I saw the pale features of the 
window-pane. I was very irritated and angry, and 
spoke harshly; and then, all at once, I am sure I 
don't know how it happened, but it flashed upon 
me that I, of all men, had no right to utter a harsh 
word to one oppressed with so wretched a Christmas 
as this poor creature was. I couldn't say another 
word, but began feeling in my pocket for some 
money, and then I asked a question or two, and 
then I don't quite know how it came about — isn't 
it very warm here ? " exclaimed Bachelor Bluff, rising 
and walking about, and wiping the perspiration from 
his brow. 

"Well, you see," he resumed, nervously, "it was 
very absurd, but I did believe the girl's story — the 
old story, you know, of privation and suffering, and 
all that — and just thought I'd go home with the 
brat and see if what she said was all true. And 
then I remembered that all the shops were closed, 
and not a purchase could be made. I went back and 
persuaded the steward to put up for me a hamper 
of provisions, which the half-wild little youngster 
helped me carry through the snow, dancing with 
delight all the way. — And isn't this enough .? " 

" Not a bit, Mr. Bluff. I must have the whole 
story." 

13 



290 BACHELOR BLUFF. 

" I declare," said Bachelor Bluff, " there's no 
whole story to tell. A widow with children in great 
need, that was what I found ; and they had a feast 
that night, and a little money to buy them a loaf and 
a garment or two the next day; and they were all 
so bright, and so merry, and so thankful, and so 
good, that, when I got home that night, I was might- 
ily amazed that, instead of going to bed sour at 
holidays, I was in a state of great contentment in 
regard to holidays. In fact, I was really merry. I 
whistled. I sang. I do believe I cut a caper. 
The poor wretches I had left had been so merry 
over their unlooked-for Christmas banquet that their 
spirits infected mine. 

" And then I got thinking again. Of course, 
holidays had been miserable to me, I said. What 
right had a well-to-do, lonely old bachelor hovering 
wistfully in the vicinity of happy circles, when all 
about there were so many people as lonely as he, 
and yet oppressed with want ? ' Good Gracious ! ' I 
exclaimed, * to think of a man complaining of lone- 
liness with thousands of wretches yearning for his 
help and comfort, with endless opportunities for work 
and company, with hundreds of pleasant and de- 
lightful things to do ! Just to think of it ! ' It 
put me in a great fury at myself to think of it. I 
tried pretty hard to escape from myself, and began 



MR. BLUFF'S EXPERIENCES OF HOLIDAYS, 291 

inventing excuses and all that sort of thing, but I 
rigidly forced myself to look squarely at my own 
conduct. And then I reconciled my conscience by 
declaring that, if ever after that day I hated a holi- 
day again, might my holidays end at once and for 
ever ! 

" Did I go and see my protegees again ? What 
a question ! Why — well, no matter. If the widow 
is comfortable now, it is because she has found a 
way to earn without difficulty enough for her few 
wants. That's no fault of mine. I would have 
done more for her, but she wouldn't let me. But 
just let me tell you about New- Year's — the New- 
Year's -day that followed the Christmas I've been 
describing. It was lucky for me there was another 
holiday only a week off. Bless you ! I had so 
much to do that day that I was completely be- 
wildered, and the hours weren't half long enough. 
I did make a few social calls, but then I hurried 
them over ; and then hastened to my little girl, 
whose face had already caught a touch of color; 
and she, looking quite handsome in her new frock 
and her ribbons, took me to other poor folk, and — 
well, that's about the whole story. 

"Oh, as to the next Christmas. Well, I didn't 
dine alone, as you may guess. It was up three 
stairs, that's true, and there was none of that ele- 



29^ BACHELOR BLUFF. 

gance that marked the dinner of the year before ; 
but it was merry, and happy, and bright; it was a 
generous, honest, hearty, Christmas dinner, that it 
was, although I do wish the widow hadn't talked 
so much about the mysterious way a turkey had 
been left at her door the night before. And Molly 
— that's the little girl — and I had a rousing appetite. 
We went to church early; then we had been down 
to the Five Points to carry the poor outcasts there 
something for their Christmas dinner; in fact, we 
had done wonders of work, and Molly was in high 
spirits, and so the Christmas dinner was a great 
success. 

" Dear me, sir, no ! Just as you say. Holidays 
are not in the least wearisome any more. Plague 
on it! When a man tells me now that he hates 
holidays, I find myself getting very wroth. I pin 
him by the button-hole at once, and tell him my 
experience. The fact is, if I were at dinner on a 
holiday, and anybody should ask me for a senti- 
ment, I should say, ' God bless all holidays ! ' " 



THE END. 



^^ 



